Timothy Heimlich Follows Wales into 18th Century British Literature

British authors of the 18th century often were influenced by their natural surroundings, a parallel that resonates with Assistant Professor Timothy Heimlich, who joined the Department of English this fall. Heimlich’s inspiration to explore how Wales fits into the landscape of British literature came from an unlikely muse: Wisconsin.  

Growing up in the Milwaukee suburbs, Heimlich frequently rode his bike to Wales, a tiny village founded by Welsh immigrants in the 1840s. The forested route included street names like Bethesda Circle, Snowden Drive and Bryn Mawr Court, and the winding paths eventually opened to a striking sight: a red dragon emblazoned on the “Welcome to Wales” sign — an innocuous border marker that ironically became the invitation to his scholarly interests.  

“I think living among those Welsh placenames made me more attuned to the moments when they appear in British writing, far more than I might have noticed otherwise,” he shares. “For American readers, British names can easily blur together, but they stood out to me.” 

Heimlich brought his inspiration with him to the University of Wisconsin-Madison and then to graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley. All along the way, he continued to notice Welsh elements surfacing in British literature yet rarely drawing critical attention. While he studied British, Scottish and Irish Romanticism, Welsh was much harder to find.  

“According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word ‘British’ in the early 18th century primarily meant Welsh,” he points out. “If you said you were British in 1703, it would have been strange to also claim you were English. By 1800, that earlier association with Welshness had largely receded and survived in a kind of vestigial way where authors used phrases like ‘Ancient British’ or ‘Old British’ to mean Welsh.” 

The realization that Britishness could not be easily separated from Welshness shaped his upcoming book: “Wales, Romanticism, and the Making of Imperial Culture.” For Heimlich, the book is about how we can't talk about being British without talking first about being Welsh. A second book project, “Gothic: The Demonology of Modernity,” examines how the genre made space for forbidden and unsettling thoughts to materialize into categories of identity.   

Heimlich obviously hopes students will enjoy the literature, but more than that, he wants to make the 18th century vital. “Through reading the texts, I want students to see a model of critical thought they can draw on and carry into their own lives,” he shares. “When critical thinking becomes second nature, we start noticing it everywhere — watching movies, scrolling through ads and even listening to the radio. That’s what I hope students take away: this ingrained, critical mode of thought.”  

And for those who see 18th-century British literature as dusty and outdated, Heimlich is ready to push back. He explains that literature from the period has striking similarities to the media environment we navigate today. “If you flip through an 18th-century magazine or the correspondence circulating in the international Republic of Letters, what you’d find looks almost like a Twitter or Instagram feed: flashes of political controversy alongside recipes, literary reviews, personal anecdotes and even sharp insults,” he shares. “It’s a swirling chaos of voices and opinions, and students think that the 18th century is boring — right up until they realize they're still living in it.”  

In addition to Heimlich, the English department is welcoming two additional faculty members, Marguerite Nguyen and Richard So.