Dr Rhys Kaminski-Jones BA, MA, PhD

Rhys Kaminski-Jones’s work focuses on connections between Welsh, English and other Celtic literatures during the eighteenth century and the Romantic era, on relationships between Celtic revivalism, Britishness and imperialism, and on building links between Celtic Studies and other academic disciplines. He joined the Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies in 2018 as a postdoctoral researcher, and is currently engaged in a British Academy funded project on the neglected Welsh Romantic author William Owen Pughe.

Rhys is also working on a monograph project entitled Reframing Welsh Revivalism: True Britons and Celtic Empires, 1707–1819. This study reveals the ways in which Welsh antiquarian and bardic revivalism was a means by which Welsh authors positioned themselves in the emerging contexts of a new British nation and a growing British empire. Based on extensive new archival research, and incorporating Welsh and English-language texts, the story that emerges does not downplay the distinctiveness of Welsh revivalism, but instead emphasizes its engagement with and importance within the period’s wider archipelagic and global developments.

Rhys has published and has forthcoming articles in journals including Romanticism, The Review of English Studies, Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion and O’r Pedwar Gwynt. He regularly speaks at academic conferences and has been interviewed about his research on BBC Radio Cymru. He welcomes any and all enquiries about his work from those inside or outside academia.

with Erin Lafford (eds.), Romanticism, special issue (forthcoming 2021/2)

with Erin Lafford, ‘Change of air: introduction’, Romanticism, special issue (forthcoming 2021/2)

‘ ‘‘Floating in the Breath of the People”: Ossianic mist, cultural health, and the creation of Celtic atmosphere, 1760–1815’, Romanticism, special issue (forthcoming 2021/2)

‘William Owen Pughe and Romantic rewritings of the poetry of Llywarch Hen’, The Review of English Studies (forthcoming 2021)

Review: Elizabeth Edwards (ed.), Richard Llwyd: Beaumaris Bay and Other Poems (Nottingham: Trent Editions, 2016), Romanticism, 26, no. 3 (2020), 305–6

with Francesca Kaminski-Jones (eds.), Celts, Romans, Britons: Classical and Celtic Influence in the Construction of British Identities (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020)

with Francesca Kaminski-Jones, ‘Introduction’, in eidem, Celts, Romans, Britons, 1–19

Review: Jeff Strabone, Poetry and British Nationalisms in the Bardic Eighteenth Century: Imagined Antiquities (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), The Review of English Studies, 70, no. 296 (2019), 775–7

‘ “Where Cymry united, delighted appear”: The Society of Ancient Britons and the celebration of St David’s day in London, 1715–1815’, Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, 23 (2017), 56–68