This appointment enables Professor Robert Morrison to work on two separate but related projects, both of which centre on the nineteenth-century essayist Thomas De Quincey and his seminal role in shaping the literature of addiction. The first project is a monograph entitled “In Excess: Trauma, Euphoria and the Literature of Addiction”. It begins with a chapter on De Quincey and then explores how writers from his day to ours have represented their experiences with drugs. The second project is an edition of De Quincey’s letters, already under contract with Oxford University Press. The edition contains a vast amount of new information on De Quincey and fills a gap in nineteenth-century literary and cultural studies, as well as in addiction studies. This project thus aims to deepen understanding of De Quincey and throw searching light on the ongoing struggle to come to terms with drug use and abuse.
