Research Project Overview and Description
“”Visionary Machines”” examines how British poets in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries used mechanical imagery to explore the limits of human agency in a rapidly industrializing world. This project investigates how poets like Shelley, Blake, and Darwin used the “”technological sublime”” to navigate the tensions between progress and resistance. By attending to the feelings of wonder and anxiety these machines inspired, the project explores how poets used the image of the machine to reimagine the individual’s place in an increasingly complex society. This project combines close literary analysis with digital humanities methods to show how technology became a vital symbol for both modern change and the poetic past.
To generate greater impact, the project will engage students and the wider public through an interactive multi-media exhibition, allowing people to reflect upon their own affective responses to new technologies such as AI. Organised in collaboration with the Arts Technology Lab at HKU, this exhibition will stage encounters with literary history to provide valuable insight for our own changing times.
Research Outcome
Lee, Tara. ‘Southey’s Juggernaut: Epic Machinery and the Acceleration of Modernity in The Curse of Kehama (1810),’ Romanticism 31.2 (July 2025): 184–196.
About the researcher
Dr. Tara Lee is an Assistant Professor and the Director of Outreach and External Liaisons in the School of English at the University of Hong Kong. She holds a BA and MPhil from the University of Cambridge and a DPhil from the University of Oxford. Her research focuses on 18th- and 19th-century British literature, specifically the intersections of poetry, science, and technology. She is the author of the forthcoming monograph William Blake and Romantic Biology and is currently leading the HKRGC-funded project Visionary Machines, which utilizes digital humanities methods to explore technological imagery in Romantic epic poetry. Her work has appeared in journals such as Studies in Romanticism, European Romantic Review, and Romanticism.
Fund Source
GRF
For enquiries
Please contact at atlab@hku.hk