Role
Professor of English, primarily engaged in teaching, researching and developing his subject, with a strong focus on public as well as academic engagement and impact. Professor Goodridge's special interests as a lecturer include poetry, eighteenth and nineteenth century literature, Romanticism, recovery research, labouring-class poets especially John Clare, and a range of modern and contemporary writings including writers on the Spanish Civil War, the poet Tony Harrison, and the novelist Philip K Dick.
Career overview
Research areas
John has recently completed editing, with his research partner Bridget Keegan, A History of British Working Class Literature (2017). He is now co-editing with Tim Fulford and John Lucas the Complete Works of Robert Bloomfield for 'Romantic Circles', and continues to edit and expand the Database of British and Irish Labouring-class Poets, 1700-1900.
Among recent publications - John Clare the Trespasser, co-authored with R.K.R. Thornton, was published by Nottingham“s small press, Five Leaves, in 2016. A centenary edition of his WW1 family history project, The Same Stars Shine, is now online. His second monograph, John Clare and Community, was published by Cambridge in 2013.
Future plans include further work on Clare and Robert Bloomfield, and a collaborative edition of the works of John Dyer, working with a team of scholars from the Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies, Aberystwyth.
External activity
- Fellow of the English Association
- Vice President of the John Clare Society
- Academic Advisor to the Robert Bloomfield Society
- Co-Founder of the Thomas Chatterton Society
- Founding Member of the British Association for Romantic Studies
- Member of the Society of Authors; the Raymond Williams Society; the Langdyke Countryside Trust
- Regular reviewer for academic publishers, scholarly journals, funding bodies, promotional panels, etc.
- Former member of the Arts and Humanities Research Council Peer-review panel
Sponsors and collaborators
Professor Goodridge and Professor Bridget Keegan (Creighton University, Omaha), with their respective research teams, are developing new resources and online platforms for the 'Database of Labouring-Class Poetry', of which Professor Goodridge is General Editor and Principal Writer. This resource emerged from work on the English Labouring-class Poets anthologies, itself a collaborative project between scholars from Creighton University, Nottingham Trent University, Oxford Brookes University, St Mary's University College Strawberry Hill, San Francisco State University, Southern Illinois University, the University of Leeds and the University of Northumbria.
Professor Goodridge works closely with the John Clare Society and the Robert Bloomfield Society, and regularly co-organises and co-hosts research and public events with them.
He has worked closely with the late Ray Gosling and with Ray's family and friends to transfer to the University and catalogue the Ray Gosling Archive, an important resource for the study of regional, radical, community-based and media writing.
Professor Goodridge has worked collaboratively with Dr Juan Christian Pellicer of Oslo University on editions of the poets John Dyer and John Philips.
He regards research as an inherently collaborative activity, and has worked on a number of other collaborative projects and will continue to work in this way where possible.
Publications
- John Clare and Community. Goodridge J, 2013, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press
- '"Hell, Hull and Halifax": John Dyer visits the workhouse'. Goodridge J, Literature and History, 2012, 21 (2), 1-15
- Labouring class poetry. Goodridge J in (eds) Higgins D and Rushton S, Teaching Romanticism, 2010, 11-23
- '"That deathless wish of climbing higher": Robert Bloomfield on the sugar loaf' in Wales and the Romantic Imagination, Goodridge J in (eds) D Walford Davies and L Pratt, 2007, 161-179, Cardiff, University of Wales Press
- 'Some rhetorical strategies in later nineteenth-century laboring-class poetry'. Goodridge J, Criticism, Fall 2005, pub. 2007, 47 (4), 531-47
- Nineteenth-Century English Labouring-Class Poets, 1700-1800 (3 volumes).McEathron S, Kossick K and Goodridge J, 2006, London, Pickering & Chatto
- Eighteenth Century British Labouring-Class Poets (3 volumes). Christmas W, Keegan B and Burke T, 2003, London, Pickering & Chatto
- Rural Life in Eighteenth-Century English Poetry. Goodridge J, 1995, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press
- Professor Goodridge is also the General Editor and Principal Writer for the online resources Labouring Class Poets Online and John Clare Resources.
Press expertise
- Robert Bloomfield (1770-1823) Poet
- Thomas Chatterton (1752-1770) Poet
- John Clare (1793-1864) Poet
- John Dyer (1700-1758), Poet
- Philip K.Dick (1928-1982) Novelist
- Labouring-class Poetry
- Working-class writing
- The Ray Gosling Archive