Staff profile

Adam Bridgen is a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow in the Department of English Studies at Durham University. In 2023 he held the Brotherton Fellowship at the University of Leeds’ Arts and Humanities Research Institute, and from 2021-23 held the Fleeman Fellowship in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture from the University of St Andrews, having been awarded a DPhil from the University of Oxford in 2020.

His research considers the social and political dimensions of long eighteenth-century literature, focusing specifically on British labouring-class poets and their engagement with the issues of slavery, resource extraction, and humankind’s relationship with the environment and non-human animals. He has published widely and across disciplines, most recently contributing essays to Hannah More in Context (2022), Romantic Environmental Sensibility: Nature, Class and Empire (2022), Animal Theologians (2023), and The Ethics of Fur: Religious, Cultural, and Legal Perspectives (2023). He is co-editor (with John Goodridge) of British Working-Class and Radical Writing since 1700, which is forthcoming with University of London Press.

His current book project, ‘From below: natural resource extraction and working-class resistance, 1767–1842’ considers the way in which working-class writers responded to extractive industries and their impacts during the first Industrial Revolution. For more about the project, please see this featured article for the Leverhulme Trust, this blog post for the Brotherton Library, or this podcast recorded for the ‘Imperial Minerals’ research project.

Bridgen serves as a reviewer for the Journal of Working-Class Studies and has been an Associate Fellow of the Oxford University Centre for Animal Ethics since 2020. His academic memberships include the Interdisciplinary Dialogues in Industry and Literature network, the Arts of Place network at the University of Birmingham, the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, and the British Association for Romantic Studies.

Research Interests

• late 17th-, 18th-century, and Romantic poetry and prose
• class; politics; british empire; slavery and abolition
• animal studies; ecocriticism; environmental humanities; extractivism
• working-class literature; women's writing; balladry and popular forms

Book review

• Bridgen, A. (2023). Literature, learning, and social hierarchy in early modern Europe: edited by Neil Kenny, Oxford, Oxford University Press (Proceedings of the British Academy, 246), 2022, 312 pp., £75.00 (hardback), ISBN 9780197267332. The Seventeenth Century, 38(4), 722-724. https://doi.org/10.1080/0268117x.2023.2218233

Chapter in book

• Bridgen, A., & Van Hagen, S. (in press). Religious Faith, Class Politics, and Equitable Progress: James Woodhouse and Elizabeth Montagu’s Contending Visions of Improvement. In J. Orchard, & M. Ellis (Eds.), Bluestockings and Landscape in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Boydell & Brewer
• Bridgen, A. (2023). "Thou Shalt Not Use the Skins of Any Living Creature" : the original anti-fur activist, Thomas Tryon (1634-1703). In A. Linzey, & C. Linzey (Eds.), The Ethics of Fur: Religious, Cultural, and Legal Perspectives. Lexington Books
• Bridgen, A. (2023). From the Pleistocene to COVID-19: A Brief History of Fur. In A. Linzey, & C. Linzey (Eds.), The Ethics of Fur: Religious, Cultural, and Legal Perspectives (15-27). Lexington Books
• Bridgen, A. (2023). Thomas Tryon (1634–1703): A Theology of Animal Enslavement. In A. Linzey, & C. Linzey (Eds.), Animal Theologians (53-75). Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197655542.003.0004
• Bridgen, A. (2023). Humphry Primatt (1735–1777): Animal Protection and Its Revolutionary Contexts. In A. Linzey, & C. Linzey (Eds.), Animal Theologians (96-123). Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197655542.003.0006
• Bridgen, A. (2022). A World of Fire and Drought: Ecosocialism, Improvement and Apocalypse in James Woodhouse’s Crispinus Scriblerus. In V.-Y. Tee (Ed.), Romantic Environmental Sensibility: Nature, Class and Empire (172-194). Edinburgh University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781474456494-013
• Bridgen, A. (2022). Defending “Reason's rein”: Rationalism as Persuasive Strategy in Hannah More's Slavery: A Poem (1788). In K. Andrews, & S. Edney (Eds.), Hannah More in Context (50-67). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003092971-3

Journal Article

• Bridgen, A. J. (2017). Patronage, Punch-Ups, and Polite Correspondence: The Radical Background of James Woodhouse’s Early Poetry. Huntington Library Quarterly, 80(1), 99-134. https://doi.org/10.1353/hlq.2017.0004