Nancy Yousef

Nancy Yousef joins Yale as Professor of English. A specialist in British and European Romanticism, with interests ranging from the eighteenth century to early modernism, Yousef’s scholarship is primarily concerned with intersections and divergences between literature and philosophy. She is the author of Isolated Cases: The Anxieties of Autonomy from Enlightenment to Romanticism (Cornell University Press, 2004), Romantic Intimacy (Stanford University Press, 2013) (winner of the Barricelli Book Prize), and The Aesthetic Commonplace: Wordsworth, Eliot, Wittgenstein and the Language of Every Day (Oxford University Press, 2022). Her essays have appeared in New Literary History, Modern Language Quarterly, European Romantic Review, the Journal of the History of Ideas, and many others. Yousef’s work has been supported by grants and fellowships from the Newcombe Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Mellon Foundation, the National Humanities Center, and the Bogliasco Foundation. Last year, she was a visiting research fellow at Merton College at Oxford and the Università Iuav in Venice. Her current project, Thinking with Words: Undisciplined Readings in Modern Philosophy, aims to bring philosophers and literary scholars into collaboration through renewed commitment to historically informed interpretive practices.