Nicholas Smart is the Astor Junior Research Fellow in English. He completed his undergraduate studies at New College between 2016 and 2019. After a year at Oriel for his MSt, he returned to New College to undertake doctoral research in 2020 under a joint scholarship from All Souls College, Oxford, the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council, and the Clarendon Fund, completed in the Spring of 2024. He received a University Gibbs Prize for his undergraduate degree and the Marilyn Butler Prize for his MSt research. He has also received the Matthew Arnold Memorial Prize for research into the criticism of Matthew Arnold and Zadie Smith, and has been highly commended on two occasions for both the Lord Alfred Douglas Prize and the Martin Starkie Poetry Prize.

Teaching

At New College, Nick has taught Prelims Paper 1 (Introduction to English Language and Literature), Paper 3 (1830 – 1910), and Paper 4 (1910 – Present). He has supervised undergraduate and MSt Dissertations on various topics from 1830 to the present, and designed courses for Visiting Students on British and American literary culture.

Research Interests

In his research, Nick is interested in everything literary from 1900 to the present, especially poetry. His first book project, Preserving Old Possum: T. S. Eliot and the Making of Reputation, explored Eliot's approach to - and anxieties about - matters of self-fashioning. It used the wealth of new primary material made available by recent editions of his work to argue that Eliot was not only an expert cultural marketer, but that he also used his poems to criticise the very strategies that were used to promote them.

In addition to Eliot, Nick has published on a variety of topics, from love letters to student notebooks, artistic 'brattiness' to the poetry of Generation Rent. He is currently interested in ideas of creativity in poetry, asking how our understanding of genius, inspiration, and spontaneity might require revision in the fossil-fuelled age of AI.

Selected Publications

Nicholas Smart, 'Anxious Attachments: Eliot's Enclosures to Emily Hale', in T. S. Eliot Studies Annual: Volume 8, ed. Kevin Rule and Craig Woelfel (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2026), forthcoming

Nicholas Smart, 'Bret/BRAT', Critical Quarterly (2025) [published pre-print, <onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/criq.70015>].

Nicholas Smart, 'F. O. Matthiessen's New College Notebook', New College Notes 24 (2025), <new.ox.ac.uk/new-college-notes>

Nicholas Smart, 'Larkin's Rented World', About Larkin 59 (2025), 6-15

Nicholas Smart, 'T. S. Eliot and the Problem of the Archive', ELH, 90.3 (2023), 851-881

Nicholas Smart, 'Arnoldian Contempt: Matthew Arnold and Zadie Smith', Matthew Arnold Memorial Prize (2022)