BA(UWO), MA, PhD(Tor)
Dr. Thompson is a King’s Inglis Professor and Professor of English at Dalhousie University.
A Romanticist by profession and predilection, Judith Thompson hails from Ontario, where she received her BA from Western in 1979. Six months wandering the moors and mountains of Britain and Europe, followed (and not completely undermined) by 7 years of graduate study at the University of Toronto, transformed her into a professor of British Romantic Literature, with a special interest in poetry and politics within the Wordsworth Circle. She came to King’s by way of University of Alberta in 1988, and teaches in the department of English at Dalhousie University, a range of classes from women’s writing to “walking words,” and from poetic voice to the postmodern novel. In recent years she has become increasingly possessed by “Citizen John” Thelwall, poet, orator, political radical and pioneer of free speech in Britain, a hidden cache of whose poetry she discovered in 2004 and is now editing. Her edition of Thelwall’s The Peripatetic was published by Wayne State UP in 2001 and a Thelwall website and digital archive, Citizen John, is under construction. She is working on a book, The Silenced Partner: John Thelwall in the Wordsworth Circle and seems fated after that to write a biography and who knows, maybe even a screenplay (it’s a GREAT story). In addition to Thelwall, she has a strong interest in Romantic women writers, and issues of genre, poetic voice and literary relationships in general. Her book Literary Couplings: Writing Couples, Collaborators and the Construction of Authorship, co-edited with Marjorie Stone, was published last year by Wisconsin UP.
