James Grande completed his undergraduate and postgraduate degrees at the University of Oxford, where he was a research assistant on the Leverhulme-funded Godwin Diary Project and wrote his doctoral thesis on the radical journalist William Cobbett.

He joined King’s in 2011 as a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow to work on the politics and aesthetics of religious dissent. Between 2014 and 2016 he was a postdoctoral research fellow on the ERC project Music in London, 1800-1851. 

Research Interests

• Music, literature and religious dissent
• Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century London
• William Cobbett and the radical press
• The Godwin-Wollstonecraft-Shelley circle

James’s research is focused on the politics and print culture of the Romantic period. His first monograph, William Cobbett, the Press and Rural England: Radicalism and the Fourth Estate, 1792-1835 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) offers a new interpretation of Cobbett as a Burkean radical whose writing cuts across the ‘revolution controversy’ of the 1790s, combining Thomas Paine’s common sense and transatlantic radicalism with Edmund Burke’s emphasis on tradition, patriotism and the domestic affections. James has also co-edited an anthology of Cobbett’s writings and a volume of essays by scholars from literary studies, social history and the history of political thought on Cobbett’s contexts and legacies.

James’s current research project is entitled ‘Articulate Sounds: Music, Dissent and Literary Culture, 1789-1840’ and explores the equivocal place of music within dissenting culture. He is also co-editing a collection of essays on song and scripture in nineteenth-century Britain and is particularly interested in the intersections between literary studies, religious history, musicology and sound studies.

For more details, please see his full research profile.

Teaching

James contributes to the teaching of poetry, life writing and the history of the novel across all undergraduate years and on the MA in Eighteenth Century Studies.

Expertise and Public Engagement

James is a Trustee of the Keats-Shelley Memorial Association, the charity that runs Keats-Shelley House in Rome, and editor of the Romantic Studies journal The Keats-Shelley Review.