Michael Edson
Associate Professor | Department Head
English
Associate Editor of Eighteenth-Century Life
Biography
Michael Edson teaches courses in Restoration and eighteenth-century British literature. His research interests include poetry, satire, printed notes (annotation), and marginalia. His methodologies include sociology of reading, manuscript study, textual editing, memory studies, reading history, and book history. He is currently working on a project exploring the place of uncertainty in reading satire.
Education
Ph.D., English, University of Delaware, 2011
Recent and Upcoming Courses
Eighteenth-Century Novel (ENGL 3400)
Making and Breaking the Canon (ENGL 2430)
Histories and Sociologies of Reading
Literary Length: Long Reading in an Era of Short Attention
Selected Publications
"Robert Burns, Name Suppression, and the Sociable Uses of Ignorance.” Huntington Library Quarterly 87.4 (2024): 635–645.
“Frances Dunlop Reads Falconer’s Shipwreck: Shared Books and Sociability in Eighteenth-Century
Scotland.” Studies in Scottish Literature 51.1 (2025): 36–52.
“Satire as Gossip: Lady Anne Hamilton’s The Epics of the Ton.” British Women Satirists in the Long Eighteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2022. 207–225.
“Manuscript Notations and Cultural Memory.” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 50 (2021): 169–184.
To learn more about Michael Edson's publications: Academia Website
The University of Wyoming has earned its Research Level 1 (R1) status from the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education, placing Wyoming's only four-year university with the top research universities in the United States.