Dr Nicholas Smart

Background:

I completed my undergraduate studies at New College, Oxford between 2016 and 2019. After a year at Oriel College for the MSt in English (1900-Present), I began my DPhil at Oxford under a joint scholarship from All Souls College, the AHRC, and the Clarendon Fund. In the final year of my DPhil, I was elected to the Astor Junior Research Fellowship at New College, where I remained for three years, before joining Magdalen as a Lecturer in October 2026.

Teaching:

At Magdalen, I teach undergraduates most of the first-year course in English, consisting of Prelims Paper 1 (Introduction to English Language and Literature), Paper 3 (Victorian Literature), and Paper 4 (Modern Literature). For Finals, I teach Paper 5 (The Romantic Period) to the second years, and supervise third-year dissertations across the university on topics within my field of expertise. I also frequently devise courses for Visiting Students.

Research:

I have published widely on the life and work of T. S. Eliot. My first book, T. S. Eliot and the Making of Reputation (Oxford University Press, 2027) explored Eliot’s approach towards – and anxieties about – matters of self-fashioning. It used the wealth of new material made available by recent editions of his poems, prose, and letters to argue that Eliot was not just an expert cultural marketer, but that he also used his poems to criticise the very strategies that were used to promote them. Elsewhere, I have written about Eliot’s theories of history, his epistolary enclosures, and his social criticism. In addition to my writing about Eliot, I am also assistant editor for The Letters of T. S. Eliot: Volume 11, forthcoming from Faber & Faber.

Beyond Eliot, I have published articles on a variety of topics in nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first-century literature and culture, including Matthew Arnold, Philip Larkin, Seamus Heaney, Zadie Smith, Bret Easton Ellis, and Charli XCX. 

Publications

Monographs

• Nicholas Smart, T. S. Eliot and the Making of Reputation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2027) [forthcoming]

Editions

• T. S. Eliot, The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Volume 11: 1945-47, ed. Valerie Eliot and John Haffenden (London: Faber & Faber, forthcoming) [I am the assistant editor for the official online appendix to the eleventh volume of Eliot’s letters, see <tseliot.com/letters/>]

Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles and Chapters in Edited Collections

• Nicholas Smart, ‘Textbook Heaney’, English (accepted and forthcoming)
• Nicholas Smart, ‘The Function of Contempt at the Present Time: Matthew Arnold and Zadie Smith’, Textual Practice (accepted and forthcoming)
• Nicholas Smart, ‘Bret/BRAT’, Critical Quarterly 68.3 (2026), 103-30
• Nicholas Smart, ‘Anxious Attachments: Eliot’s Enclosures to Emily Hale’, in T. S. Eliot Studies Annual: Volume 8, ed. Kevin Rulo and Craig Woelfel (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2026), 183-205
• Nicholas Smart, ‘F. O. Matthiessen’s New College Notebook’, New College Notes 24.7 (2025), 1-12
• Nicholas Smart, ‘Larkin’s Rented World’, About Larkin 59(2025), 6-15
• Nicholas Smart, ‘T. S. Eliot and the Problem of the Archive’, ELH: English Literary History 90.3 (2023), 851-81