Jamison Kantor focuses on Romantic literature and the Black diaspora in the 18th and 19th centuries. He is also interested in materialism—whether in the form of social practices (dueling), physical agents (viruses) or technology (steam powered printers)—and its relation to the culture of modern political movements like Marxism, Liberalism and Conservatism.

His first book, Honor, Romanticism, and the Hidden Value of Modernity (Cambridge, 2022), argues that Romantic writing and art represents honor’s equalizing power alongside its more traditional form, honor as hierarchy or domination. Drawing on the philosophical and artistic innovations of slave narratives—as well as gothic mystery, topographical poems and the financial novel—the book also addresses an ongoing political problem, in which abstractions about individual liberty overwhelm real, social forms of dignity. Kantor's book-in-progress considers technology, automation and the idea of historical inevitability from 1750 to 1850. One chapter claims that Mary Shelley’s novel The Last Man—which features an apocalyptic pandemic—develops a new form of knowledge, “crisis thinking,” where, like the spread of viral matter, thought must become entirely spatial (rather than temporal, capable of changing things over time). Another chapter looks at Black poets Francis Williams and Phillis Wheatley Peters, who challenge repetition in neoclassical verse to argue for the literary influence of non-white subjects, labelled by empire as mere automatons of language and, thus, incapable of making history. Both books address an essential modern problem identified early on by the Romantics: how rich social phenomena—racial difference, artistic production and knowledge work—are hollowed out by formalization, proceduralism and automation. 

Kantor's recent articles have been featured in The Keats-Shelley Journal, The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, Jump Cut, and PMLA. 

Before coming to The Ohio State University, Kantor was a visiting assistant professor at Colby College and lecturer at Georgetown University. He is delighted to work with students at all levels on projects, traditional and non-traditional.

Selected Publications

Honor, Romanticism, and the Hidden Value of Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022.

“Sky and Hammer: Romantic Negation and the System of Needs in the 1820s,” The Keats-Shelley Journal no.70, 2021. 

“Animal Kingdom: The Body Politics of The Favourite,” Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media no. 60, 2021.

"Immortality, Romanticism, and the Limit of the Liberal Imagination." PMLA, vol. 133, no. 3, 2018, pp. 508-525.

“Horace Walpole and the Fate of Finance.” The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, vol. 58, no. 2, 2017, pp. 135-55.

Curriculum Vitae