Ewan Jones

Dr. Ewan Jones is Associate Professor in Nineteenth-Century Literature at the University of Cambridge's Faculty of English and a Fellow at Downing College, where he serves as Director of Studies for Part II. He completed his BA, MPhil, and PhD at King's College, Cambridge, and was previously Thole Research Fellow at Trinity Hall.

His educational background includes comprehensive training in English literature at Cambridge, with specialization in nineteenth-century literary studies. His academic journey reflects deep engagement with both traditional literary scholarship and innovative computational approaches to textual analysis.

Dr. Jones's research concentrates on poetics, embodied cognition, and computational approaches to intellectual history. His work fundamentally questions how we understand 'close reading' not as interpretation but as a specific cognitive practice. He explores how aesthetic phenomenology can illuminate historical reading communities, develops pedagogical routines to de-habituate standard attention modes, and seeks constructive engagement between computational analysis and traditional reading practices. His scholarship bridges literary studies with cognitive science, demonstrating how rhythm, attention, and cognition intersect in literary form.

His research trajectory shows increasing focus on attentional practices in reading, with recent work examining group attention practices and rhythm in Victorian poetry. The computational dimension of his work has grown steadily, moving from individual textual analysis to large-scale corpus studies through projects like the Concept Lab.

• Fulbright Scholar
• Leverhulme Research Fellowship (2021/22) on 'Close Reading as Attentional Practice'
• Residential fellow at the Swedish Collegium of Advanced Study
• Visiting fellow at Ludwig Maximilian Universität
• Visiting fellow at Pomona College

Dr. Jones supervises doctoral work on diverse topics including 'radical conservatism' in Victorian poetry, queer theory and historical poetics, Wagner reception in Anglophone poetry, morphogenetic conceptions of form, and metre and exact measurement. His interdisciplinary collaborations include work with Phyllis Weliver on digitizing Tennyson manuscripts and with Peter de Bolla on computational concept analysis projects that have secured significant research funding. He has developed innovative teaching approaches that integrate cognitive science with literary analysis.

He co-founded and participates in the Concept Lab, an interdisciplinary project developing open-source computational resources for historical dataset analysis. This initiative has fostered collaborations across humanities and computer science disciplines, creating tools that bridge traditional literary scholarship with digital methods. His work with the Princeton Prosody Archive demonstrates his commitment to building scholarly infrastructure for rhythm and meter studies.