A scholar of 18th- and 19th-century British literature, Taylor Schey specializes in Romanticism and works at the intersection of poetics and critical theory, with a particular focus on how literary language both registers and participates in the historical production of race.  

Schey’s scholarship has appeared in journals such as Eighteenth-Century Fiction, ELH, MLQ, Studies in Romanticism and SubStance. He is co-editor of a special issue of Comparative Literature titled “The Point of Impasse” (2020). His current book project, The Rhetoric of Racialization: British Romanticism and Everyday Antiblackness, elucidates the subtle and quotidian figural operations through which logics of antiblackness were insidiously consolidated in the early 19th century.  

Schey holds a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Emory University and a bachelor’s degree from the University of Minnesota. Before coming to the University of Virginia, he taught at N.C. State University, the University of Michigan and Macalester College.   

In the fall, Schey will teach “Literatures of Revolutionary Hope and Radical Pessimism,” an intermediate undergraduate course that explores how diverse artistic and intellectual movements have imagined the possibility of social transformation. In the spring, he will teach a graduate seminar titled “Race-Making and Romanticism,” as well as an introductory seminar on poetry.