Faculty Research Fellow
Angela Esterhammer (Ph.D. 1990, Princeton University) works in the areas of British, German, and European Romanticism and nineteenth-century culture, from perspectives that highlight varieties of performance and performativity. Her books include The Romantic Performative: Language and Action in British and German Romanticism (2000), Romanticism and Improvisation, 1750-1850 (2008), and Print and Performance in the 1820s: Improvisation, Speculation, Identity (2020). In addition to serving as Principal of Victoria College from 2012 to 2024, she is the Founding Director of the Jackman Scholars-in-Residence program and the General Editor of the Edinburgh Edition of the Works of John Galt.
Fellowship Research Project: John Galt and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Economy
My project analyzes the cultural transformations of the post-Napoleonic era through a focus on the Scottish-born writer and entrepreneur John Galt (1779–1839). Galt’s experiments with new periodical media, his idiosyncratic use of narrative voice and perspective, his hybrid forms of history and fiction, and his expansive geographies gave a new profile to nineteenth-century authorship. I explore the insights Galt’s work provides into the changing relationships of authors and reading publics and the print-culture networks that linked Britain to continental Europe, America, and colonial spaces in his increasingly mobile and globalized age.