Nancy Yousef, a scholar of Romanticism whose research explores the vital intersections between philosophy and literature, has been appointed the Bird White Housum Professor of English, effective July 1.
She joined Yale's Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) in 2025.
Yousef, who came to Yale from Rutgers University, takes a unique approach to the study of Romanticism by engaging with earlier Enlightenment philosophies and pursuing the long afterlife of Romanticism in the Victorian and Modern period.
Her books have been praised by peers in her field: the most recent, "The Aesthetic Commonplace: Wordsworth, Eliot, Wittgenstein and the Language of Every Day" (Oxford University Press, 2022), examines the ordinary as a region of overlooked value in the work of the Romantic poet William Wordsworth, the realist novelist George Eliot, and the modern philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who are best known for their commitment to the everyday as a resource for reflection on language, thought, feeling, and social attunement. Her second book, "Romantic Intimacy" (Stanford University Press, 2013) - an interdisciplinary study of shared feeling as imagined in 18th-century ethics, Romantic literature, and 20th-century psychoanalysis featuring original interpretations of Hume, Rousseau, Kant, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Austen - was the winner of the 2014 Jean-Pierre Barricelli Book Prize for the year's best work in Romanticism and selected as a Choice Outstanding Academic Title. She is also a frequently published essayist and has authored essays on literary figures including George Orwell, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Charles Dickens, among others.
Yousef's writing and scholarship have earned her numerous awards and fellowships throughout her career. In 2025, she received a Bogliasco Residential Fellowship in Italy and a visiting research fellowship at Merton College, Oxford University. She has been the recipient of fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies (2002-2003) and the National Humanities Center (2006-2007), and has won multiple essay prizes, including the 2010 Keats-Shelley Association Essay Prize.
Since joining Yale's faculty, Yousef has designed curricula for four new courses, all of which she taught in her first year on campus: "Romanticism," "George Eliot," "Romanticism and the Ethical Imagination," and a first-year seminar titled "Jane Austen." She has been recognized for her teaching in the past, winning the Whiting Teaching Award in 2002 from Baruch College.
Yousef received her A.B. at Harvard University and her M.Phil. and Ph.D. from Columbia University.
