Conrad Steel is a literary critic who works on modern and contemporary writing from Britain, America, and France.
His first book, The Poetics of Scale: From Apollinaire to Big Data (2024), shows how poetic form offered a way to think about complex systems in the twentieth century. At present he is working on a cultural history of the reasons why people have written poetry without showing anyone. Other ongoing projects include a collaborative investigation of the links between literature and therapy, an exhibition about the novelist Christopher Isherwood, and a translated collection of the key texts of postwar French poetics. At Keble, he teaches literature in English from the nineteenth century onwards.