About Matthew Beaumont
Education and Experience
Matthew Beaumont studied English at LMH, Oxford, before doing an MSt and DPhil at Linacre College, Oxford. He became a Senior Lecturer in 2008 and a Professor of English Literature in 2016 at University College London.
His teaching interests include nineteenth-century literature; the fin de siècle; early modernism; C20 avant-gardes; film; crime fiction; utopian and dystopian literature; and Marxist and other literary and cultural theories.
Matthew Beaumont studied English at LMH, Oxford, before doing an MSt and DPhil at Linacre College, Oxford. He became a Senior Lecturer in 2008 and a Professor of English Literature in 2016 at University College London.
His teaching interests include nineteenth-century literature; the fin de siècle; early modernism; C20 avant-gardes; film; crime fiction; utopian and dystopian literature; and Marxist and other literary and cultural theories.
Research Interests
Matthew’s research interests center on various aspects of the metropolitan city, especially London. He is currently writing a history of literature about London for Cambridge University Press. He is also working on a book-length project about the role of insomnia in the nineteenth and twentieth-century literature, painting and philosophy.
His most recent books are The Walker: On Losing and Finding Oneself in the Modern City, a series of chapters on writers including Chesterton, Dickens, Ford, Wells, and Woolf, all of whom have placed the experience of walking in the metropolis at the center of their attempts to understand and represent modernity; and Lev Shestov: Philosopher of the Sleepless Night, a book that revives the reputation of a neglected early twentieth-century Russian thinker by placing him in dialogue with Adorno, Benjamin, Deleuze, and other continental philosophers.
Books
The Walker: On Losing and Finding Oneself in the Modern City
Lev Shestov: Philosopher of the Sleepless Night
Nightwalking: A Nocturnal History of London, Chaucer to Dickens
The Spectre of Utopia: Utopian and Science Fictions at the Fin de Siècle
Utopia Ltd.: Ideologies of Social Dreaming in England, 1870-1900, and
The Task of the Critic: Terry Eagleton in Dialogue.
The Walker: On Finding and Losing Yourself in the Modern City
There is no such thing as the wrong step; every time we walk we are going somewhere. Moving around the modern city becomes more than getting from A to B, but a way of understanding who and where you are. In a series of riveting intellectual rambles, Matthew Beaumont retraces a history of the walker.
From Charles Dicken’s insomniac night rambles to wandering through the faceless, windswept monuments of the neoliberal city, the act of walking is one of escape, self-discovery, disappearances, and potential revolution. Pacing stride for stride alongside such literary amblers and thinkers as Edgar Allen Poe, Andrew Breton, HG Wells, Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, and Ray Bradbury, Matthew Beaumont explores the relationship between the metropolis and its pedestrian life.
Matthew Beaumont asks can you get lost in a crowd? It is polite to stare at people walking past on the street? What differentiates the city of daylight and the nocturnal metropolis? What connects walking, philosophy, and the big toe? Can we save the city – or ourselves – by taking the pavement?
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