Dr Peter Denney

Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow
Room 853 Brennan Building

+61 2 9036 5248

Peter Denney recently gained his PhD from the University of York, with a thesis entitled ‘Silencing the Poor: Soundscape, Landscape and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain.’ This examined changing attitudes to the land and the rural poor in polite culture, chiefly through a study of poetry and landscape painting. He has published articles on several topics, and has recently begun work on a new project, which aims to explore the influence of British landscape aesthetics on perceptions of soundscape in colonial Australia and New Zealand.

Research Areas

• Eighteenth-century British history
• Poetry and painting of rural life
• Literature and politics in the 1790s
• Labouring-class poetry, c. 1730-1840

Selected publications

‘The Talk of the Tap-Room: Bloomfield, Politics and Popular Culture,’ Romantic Circles Praxis Series (forthcoming 2009).

‘“Unpleasant, tho’ Arcadian Spots”: Plebeian Poetry, Polite Culture and the Sentimental Economy of the Landscape Park,’ Criticism 47, no.4 (2005).

‘“Botanising on the Asphalt”: Australian Modernity and the Street Poetics of Kenneth Slessor,’ Journal of Australian Studies 72 (2002).