The Romanticist bridging philosophy and literature

Every year, Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences welcomes exceptional scholars across the sciences, humanities, and social sciences. This series profiles six of the faculty joining the FAS in the 2025–26 academic year, highlighting their academic achievements, research ambitions, and the teaching they hope to do at Yale. Learn more about the incoming faculty joining the FAS. 

What makes a friendship? How do friendships—or marriages—get broken? How are bonds between people formed?

Nancy Yousef finds surprising answers to these questions in Romantic texts.

Yousef, a Professor of English joining Yale this fall, is a Romanticist. But she also engages with the literary periods on either side of the Romantics—the Enlightenment, the Victorian period, and even the Modernist era—an approach she acknowledges is “a bit unusual.” 

“Literary scholars do tend to specialize, so I’m glad that I’ve been able to exercise the freedom to free range a bit,” she says with a smile. 

Studying those who influenced the Romantics, and those who were inspired by them in turn, is essential for understanding why philosophy was so critical to Romantic literature, Yousef argues. “From my perspective, it’s impossible, really, to study eighteenth century literature and nineteenth century literature without some connection to the philosophical context. Many philosophers were imaginative writers, and many poets were in conversation with philosophers, so it’s a necessary interconnection.”

Throughout her career, Yousef has been intensely interested in this relationship between literature and philosophy—two forms of writing she says are “deeply related but often estranged.”

Literature and philosophy in conversation

For all her love of philosophy, Yousef is a literary scholar through and through. That distinction comes down to her fascination with language and how it structures our thinking. “Why am I a literary scholar and not a philosopher? The reason has to do with language, and the sense that we don't think outside of language,” Yousef says. “Language is constitutive of how we imagine everything.”

She points to an early encounter with William Wordsworth as an example of why literature can be such a crucial window into philosophy.

In Wordsworth’s unfinished, autobiographical poem The Prelude, the narrator stumbles around a mountain at night, unsure what is real and what he might be dreaming. Reading The Prelude as an undergraduate, Yousef found herself contemplating the question of dream versus reality for the first time.

She recalls walking home from class that night and sneaking peeks behind her to ensure the library was indeed still there—an experience she laughs at now. “I can’t say that’s the experience that drew me to Romanticism, but that was a focal text. That kind of philosophical question about dream and reality, and what of the sensuous world we can trust, gripped me.”

“When this issue arises in Wordsworth, there's figurative language shaping the question,” she adds. “There's emotional inflection. It’s somehow a more immediate and urgent and specific experience of the philosophical that comes across in literature.”

Yousef's commitment to putting literature and philosophy in conversation is evident in each of her books. The most recent, The Aesthetic Commonplace: Wordsworth, Eliot, Wittgenstein, and the Language of Every Day (Oxford University Press, 2022) was a first-of-its-kind examination of the “substantive lines of connection” between Wordsworth and realist novelist George Eliot with the modern philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. The book highlights all three thinkers’ inclination to see everyday life as a site of literary and philosophical insight, and illustrates the interwoven nature of art and philosophy from the late nineteenth century into the early twentieth.

Her two previous books—Isolated Cases: The Anxieties of Autonomy from Enlightenment to Romanticism (Cornell University Press, 2004) and Romantic Intimacy (Stanford University Press, 2013), the latter of which won the  Jean-Pierre Barricelli Book Prize, which recognizes the year’s best book in Romanticism studies—also probe how ideas of selfhood, interpersonal connection, and sympathy shifted from the early Enlightenment through the Romantic era.

She has several courses planned that will allow students to deep dive into the eras of her expertise, which will no doubt be popular with English majors and beyond: in the fall, she'll teach a first-year seminar on the works of Jane Austen, as well as a senior seminar on George Eliot. She’ll then have her “romanticism debut,” as she calls it, in the spring, offering undergraduate and graduate sections on Romanticism and the “ethical imagination.”

Humanistic thinking in difficult times

Yousef’s next project, Thinking with Words: Undisciplined Readings in Modern Philosophy will combine two explorations. One is a “practical intervention in preserving and re-imagining part of the humanities curriculum,” she says, which will ask literary studies colleagues and philosophers anew how to incorporate texts from the philosophical canon into their teaching and analysis. 

The other facet of the book is a historical examination of Anglo-American philosophy departments, specifically the historical moment they took a turn toward the scientific. 

“This started to happen in the early years of the twentieth century, with people like Bertrand Russell in Cambridge,” she explains. “But there was a more decisive shift in the immediate aftermath of the second World War.” She's also become fascinated by the 1930s in England—a methodologically vibrant time, but one also characterized by rising political anxiety in the face of rising fascism on the European continent, and the eventual outbreak of World War II. 

Learning more about this period has shown Yousef how humanistic fields of study can buoy individuals and communities in dark times—and help to reassert the value of morality, nuance, art, and philosophy when faced with frightening realities.

As part of her research for Thinking with Words, Yousef spent time in Oxford last spring. There, she combed university archives to understand what philosophers and other academics were discussing on the eve of World War II, and “how academic philosophers were imagining their role at this years-long moment of political crisis and imminent catastrophe.”

“They kept doing their work. There was real conviction in the value of reading and writing and working in the humanities,” she explains. “It was clear to philosophers, and to someone like [George] Orwell,” who is one subject of the upcoming book, “that what autocrats and idealogues want is to stop people from thinking and writing.”

It was heartening, she says, to see that her predecessors in the humanities persisted in the face of difficult challenges, and that same commitment to humanistic fields of study was one of the notable values that attracted Yousef to Yale. She was particularly impressed by the centrality of humanities in the undergraduate curriculum. “I’m very excited about being somewhere that is explicitly, institutionally committed to keeping the humanities and the liberal arts at the core of what university education at the undergraduate level is about.”

Being part of Yale’s storied English department was a potent draw, too. “I can’t tell you how many books and essays by Yale romanticists have been in my bibliographies and on my syllabi all these years,” she says. Like the writers and philosophers she studies, Yousef sees herself as one more humanist in a long line of thinkers dedicated to understanding what connects human beings to one other—and what role art and philosophy can play in bringing us together.

“I feel honored and humbled to be joining what I think of as a vibrant department, where I feel like I have a great deal in common with the faculty, but am also contributing to a generations-long project of working and thinking in creative and generative ways with literature.”