Dr Diana Little

Background

My research examines intersecting literary and scientific currents in the long transatlantic Romantic period (1750-1850). Before coming to Merton, I earned my PhD in English from Princeton University. Prior to that, I completed my B.A. at McGill University and MSt in English (1700-1830) at Jesus College, University of Oxford, where I was a Clarendon Scholar.  

Research

My current book project, Imperial Erosions: The Geological Poetics of Empire, 1780-1830, unearths how British and American poets excavated the future of empire from the deep pasts of rocks. Eighteenth-century geologists such as Comte de Buffon and James Hutton spun “poetic” and “romantic” theories of the earth that defied national boundaries. Hutton’s revolutionary discovery of the rock cycle (erosion, deposition, uplift, tilt) in the 1790s suggested that all landscapes are built on recycled, foreign sediments. As the British Empire began exhibiting early signs of decay, and the newly independent America signs of expanding influence, rocks were read as prophets of the rise and fall–– or rather uplift and erosion–– of empire. For poets and scientists, eroding or shifting environments indexed the corrosive effects of commercial mining, the shockwaves of global revolutions in local regions, and the westward thrust of the American frontier at the cost of Indigenous peoples and cultures.

More broadly, I am interested in how developing environmental sciences in the long eighteenth century shaped literary and political discourses, and vice versa. I have published on the entanglements of poetic form and early ecology in the poetry of William Wordsworth and John Clare. At Merton, I plan to begin a sequel project to Imperial Erosions. This project, Abolition and Catastrophe, will consider how geological catastrophe shaped Abolitionist imaginaries across the Atlantic world in the long eighteenth century.

Publications

“‘Weaves of homely stuff’: Ecological Formings in John Clare’s ‘Birds Nests,’” The Explicator 84.1 (2026): 94-99. https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2025.2537435.

“‘Bitter Memory’ Meets ‘Dark Retrospect’: Charlotte Smith, Satan, and the Politics of Nostalgia in The Emigrants,” Women’s Writing 31.4 (2024): 517-535. https://doi.org/10.1080/09699082.2023.2261683

“Wordsworth’s Webs: Spinning the Ecological Elegy,” European Romantic Review 34.3 (2023): 267-278. https://doi.org/10.1080/10509585.2023.2205077