Miranda Burgess works on British and Irish literature from the 1780s to the 1830s, and the history and theory of genre, mobility, media, and feeling. She is the author of British Fiction and the Production of Social Order, 1740-1830, which explores the uses of genre change in developing theories of British society and British nationhood. She is completing Romantic Transport: Mobility, Anxiety, and the Poetics of Feeling, 1790-1830, a book that examines ‘transport’ (the movement of feelings and objects, and the technologies facilitating each) and anxiety (in its clinical and more broadly social senses) in relation to the poetics of the figure and narrative form at the turn of the nineteenth century. Her next project, On being moved: Mobility and Romantic Aesthetics, is a cultural history of the emergence and embrace, in poetics and criticism as well as in philosophical aesthetics, of an intentional understanding of aesthetic experience, in which what is above all at stake in the reading of literature or the viewing of art is the activation, transformation, and potential or actual physical mobilization--in short, the movement--of the reader.

Miranda Burgess holds a UBC Killam Research Prize for 2002.