Dr Elisa Cozzi

Dr Elisa Cozzi is the Parnell Junior Research Fellow in Irish Studies at Magdalene.

Dr Cozzi specialises in Irish, British and Italian literary culture of the Romantic period, and her work examines the circulation of manuscript material, radical ideas and literary influence across Europe.

Her first book project, ‘Italy and the Irish Romantics: Irish–Italian Networks, Narratives, and Manuscript Culture, 1785–1835’, is a study of Irish–Italian literary and cultural exchanges. It argues for Italianism as an essential current in Irish Romanticism, drawing extensively on the previously unexamined papers of Irish writers in the Byron–Shelley circle in Pisa, including Margaret Mount Cashell, George William Tighe and John Taaffe. By recovering poems, novels, correspondence, diaries and other manuscripts preserved in their descendants’ archives, the monograph reconstructs literary networks and bodies of work that have remained largely absent from accounts of Romanticism.

During her fellowship, Dr Cozzi will develop a second book-length study, ‘The Irish Idea: Ireland and British Romanticism, 1798–1829’, which explores how Irish texts and ideas helped define debates about nationhood and identity in Britain in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The project reassesses Ireland’s role as a generative force in British literary culture, shedding new light on the intertwined histories of the two nations and connecting past debates on sovereignty and belonging with present-day questions about borders, migration and the legacy of empire.

Dr Cozzi is also one of four editors of The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, a three-volume edition of Shelley’s correspondence under contract with Oxford University Press. The edition contains all known letters edited from manuscripts, with volumes scheduled for publication in 2028, 2032 and 2036.

Prior to joining Magdalene, she held a National Endowment for the Humanities Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies, University of Notre Dame, and a lectureship in English at Somerville College, Oxford. She completed her doctorate in English at The Queen’s College, University of Oxford, following a BA in English at the University of York and an MSt in English (1700–1830) at Oxford. She has also held visiting fellowships at the Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies, University of Aberdeen (2025), and the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies, Queen Mary University of London (2023).

Research Interest

• Romanticism
• Irish Studies
• Coteries, Literary Sociability, Manuscript Culture
• Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Poetry
• Literary Correspondence
• Influence and Allusion
• Textual Editing and Digital Scholarship
• Irish–Italian and Anglo-Italian Literary Exchanges
• Romantic Literature and Science, particularly Volcanology and Aerostation

Career / Research Highlights

• 2025 New Voices in Irish and Scottish Studies Visiting Fellowship, University of Aberdeen.
• 2023 Early-Career Visiting Fellowship, The British Association for Eighteenth-Century Studies & the Queen Mary Centre for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Queen Mary University of London.
• 2023 Sir John Rhŷs Essay Prize in Celtic Studies, Faculty of English, University of Oxford.
• 2023 BARS Stephen Copley Research Award, British Association for Romantic Studies.
• 2022 Carl H. Pforzheimer Jr Research Grant, The Keats-Shelley Association of America.

Professional Affiliations

• British Association for Romantic Studies (BARS)
• British Association of Irish Studies (BAIS)
• Eighteenth Century Ireland Society (ECIS)
• Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (AFHEA)