Dr Mathelinda Nabugodi

Mathelinda Nabugodi’s research uses archival objects to uncover links between British Romanticism and the Black Atlantic.

Academic interests

Mathelinda Nabugodi’s academic interests include: 

• Poetry and poetics
• Literary archives
• Histories of race and racialisation
• Creative critical methods
• Textual scholarship
• Translation in theory and practice.

Degrees obtained

• MA (Hons), Edinburgh.
• MA, UCL.
• PhD, UCL.

Awards and prizes

• Publications of the English Goethe Society Prize for best article of the year, 2022.
• Deborah Rogers Foundation Writers’ Award, 2021.
• Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship, Huntington Library, 2020.
• Carr-Thomas-Ovenden Visiting Fellowship in English, Bodleian Library, 2018.
• James Hutchison Stirling Prize for Academic Achievement in Philosophy, 2007.

Biography

Mathelinda Nabugodi is a Research Associate at the Fitzwilliam Museum. She is also working on a book, The Trembling Hand: Reflections of a Black Woman in the Romantic Archive, in which she studies objects that once belonged to the great Romantic poets but now linger in the secretive confines of the archive: Wordsworth’s teacup, Byron’s carnival mask, Shelley’s yellow kidskin glove and the like. These objects reveal how the poets’ lives were embedded in a global economy fuelled by slavery and exploitation.

She was the first to be awarded a PhD in Creative Critical Writing from UCL for an experimental reading of Percy Bysshe Shelley together with Walter Benjamin, which will appear as Shelley with Benjamin: A Critical Mosaic in late 2022. She has also edited Shelley’s translations from Aeschylus, Calderón and Goethe for volumes five and six of The Poems of Shelley and published articles on translation, ekphrasis, creative critical methods, and the racist history of hair.

Other interests

Jazz, window-gazing and sunny afternoons.