Tristram Wolff

Tristram Wolff is an Associate Professor of English at Northwestern University, affiliated with the Programs in Comparative Literary Studies and Environmental Policy & Culture. He holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Berkeley. His research interrogates intersections of language, time, and nature in transatlantic Romanticism, challenging colonialist and racialized frameworks in literary and linguistic historiography. His first monograph Against the Uprooted Word (2022) re-examines linguistic theories of the Romantic era to contest Enlightenment-era primitivism, while his second book project explores affect theory through Romantic-era critical writing.

Wolff teaches courses on William Blake, transatlantic Romanticism, environmental humanities, and literary engagements with geology and extractivism. He co-edited a 2021 special issue of Romantic Circles Praxis Series on public feeling and has published widely in journals like PMLA and English Literary History.

His scholarship bridges literary criticism, critical theory, and interdisciplinary environmental studies, emphasizing reparative readings that reimagine social forms through language's material and temporal dimensions.