Pamela Clemit

Professor Pamela Clemit works across the disciplines of literature, history, philosophy, and politics. She specializes in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and has particular expertise in the Godwin-Shelley family of writers. Most of her research is based on manuscript sources.

Pamela Clemit works mainly on the two generations of writers and thinkers influenced by the French Revolution in Britain, with a particular focus on the radical polymath William Godwin (1756-1836). Her principal research project is The Letters of William Godwin, which is being published in six volumes by Oxford University Press. Volume I: 1788-1797, for which she held a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship, was published in 2011, and Volume II: 1798-1805 in 2014. Volume IV: 1816-1828 is currently in production, and will be published in advance of Volume III: 1806-1815. She continues to teach, research, and publish in other areas of interest. These include letter writing as a social practice, the 1790s, the Mary Wollstonecraft diaspora, and the political novel (broadly conceived). Pamela Clemit is a regular reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement and a contributor to Tom Hodgkinson’s Idler magazine.

Pamela Clemit was a member of the inaugural class of Fellows at the New York Public Library’s Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, working under the directorship of Peter Gay. She has held Visiting Fellowships at a number of Oxford colleges, including All Souls College and Wadham College.

She received the Keats-Shelley Association of America Distinguished Scholar award for 2016. She is a Fellow of the English Association and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

Follow Pamela on Bluesky @pamelaclemit.bsky.social