Matthew Scott lives in west London and the Welsh borders and has lectured in English and American Literature at Reading University since 2006. Before that he taught at Oxford for five years, where he was Departmental Lecturer in English (1740-1832), having written a doctoral thesis there on Romantic literature. He has held visiting positions at Brown University (as a John Nicolas Brown fellow) and Harvard (as a Kennedy Memorial Scholar), and has since lectured at many universities in both North America and Europe. He has published very widely on the literature of Romanticism and on other related matters in the history of ideas.