Academics

Welcome

I joined Keble in October 2009 as Fellow by Special Election in Modern English Literature. I teach the first-year papers Victorian Literature (1832-1900), Modern Literature (1900-present), and Introduction to Literary Studies, and some third-year options for Special Authors and Special Topics, if your interests fall within modern literature. I am also Director of the Washington University in St. Louis exchange programme, and for 2010-2011 am acting as Director of Studies in English.

Previously I was a non-stipendiary Lecturer at Magdalen College in 2008-9, and at Hertford College in 2007-8. I was a graduate student at Corpus Christi College from 2004 to 2009, and from April-July 2008 I was the Eduard Fraenkel Scholar at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa. I did my BA here at Keble from 2000-2003, so have now experienced undergraduate English at the college from both sides of the desk.

The photo on the right was taken by Ken Reynolds on 3 July 2008 in the Pusey Room at Keble, during the conference Geoffrey Hill and his Contexts, of which I was one of the organisers.

Research Interests

My current research is focussed on the relations between poetry and intellectual history, particularly the history of linguistic thought. I also have research interests in modern book history and in modern poetry and writing more generally.

Forthcoming from Peter Lang early in 2011 will be an essay collection Geoffrey Hill and his Contexts, edited by Piers Pennington and myself. It includes contributions from Steven Matthews, Piers Pennington, Charles Lock, Kathryn Murphy, Michael Molan, Marcus Waithe, Sheridan Burnside, Matthew Paskins, Hugh Haughton, Kenneth Haynes and Geoffrey Hill, as well as my own essay 'Hill and Nineteenth-Century Linguistic Thought' and an introduction jointly written with my co-editor.

On the 19 October 2010 I will be giving a paper at the Cambridge University Twentieth-Century Literature Seminar under the title 'Etymology and Postwar Poetry'.

On 18 September 2010 I gave a talk 'Trench Among the Moderns', which concerned R.C. Trench's mid-Victorian works of popular philology and their influence on Hopkins, Joyce, Empson and Geoffrey Hill, at the conference 'Re-Imagining the Victorians, 1901-2010', University of Leeds.

On 17 September 2010 I gave a talk 'Trade Publishers and Small Presses', at the conference 'British and Irish Poetry 1960-2010', Queen's University, Belfast. This was preparatory work towards the chapter on this topic I have been asked to contribute to Peter Robinson (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary British and Irish Poetry (Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2012).

Recent articles:

—Thomas Roebuck and Matthew Sperling, '"The Glacial Question, Unsolved": A Specimen Commentary on Lines 1-31', Glossator: Practice and Theory of the Commentary, 2: On the Poems of J.H. Prynne (Spring 2010), 39-78. Also on googlebooks. A reader's response to the article here.

—Matthew Sperling, 'Water', in Peter Robinson (ed.), An Unofficial Roy Fisher (Exeter: Shearsman, 2010). And see my previous more substantial piece on Fisher: '“The Making of the Book”: Roy Fisher, the Circle Press and the Poetics of Book Art', Literature Compass, 4:5 (July 2007), Special Issue on Modern Book History, 1444–1459, and my earlier review of The Long and the Short of It: Poems 1955-2005 from 2006.

In 2009 I completed a doctoral thesis 'Visionary Philology: Geoffrey Hill and the Study of Language', supervised by Dr. D.P. McDonald and examined by Prof. Kenneth Haynes and Prof. Sir Christopher Ricks. It examines the relations between poetry, criticism and the history of linguistic thought, taking Hill's work for a case study. I am now working to convert it into a monograph.

I have also occasionally written reviews of poetry books, some of which are retrievable online through the usual engines. Finally, for the real enthusiasts, in 2005 a fourteen-page selection of my own greenhorn efforts was published in Peter McDonald (ed.), Tower Poets: Five Years of Tower Poetry, also available from Amazon Marketplace sellers here. Stride Magazine's reviewer had the measure of them here: