Benjamin Morgan's first book, The Outward Mind: Materialist Aesthetics in Victorian Science and Literature (University of Chicago Press, 2017), explores how nineteenth-century sciences of mind and emotion generated new and controversial explanations of the human experience of the arts. The book reflects on the long history of using evolutionary theory and cognitive science to make sense of art and literature and develops some theoretical tools for articulating the unusual physicality of aesthetic experience. He discusses an array of Victorian literature and science writing, including the work of Herbert Spencer, Grant Allen, Walter Pater, William Morris, Thomas Hardy, Oscar Wilde, and Vernon Lee. These writers explored and debated a materialist, broadly anti-Kantian conception of aesthetic experience as an embodied relation between person and artwork.
His current book project, In Human Scale: The Aesthetics of Climate Change, asks how art and literature attempt to bring long and vast processes of ecological devastation into human frames of reference. One of the imaginative problems confronted in the era of climate change is that, although global warming, ocean acidification, and extinction are happening extremely quickly at a geological time scale, these disasters appear slow or distant from a human perspective. Morgan's project argues that this “scalar disjuncture” originates with British industrialization and earth sciences and shows how literary and cultural forms like the naturalist novel, utopian literature, the panorama, or decadent aesthetics developed formal strategies for fusing human and inhuman scales of time and space. Parts of In Human Scale can be read here and here.
Benjamin was an ARC Fellow in Spring 2009 – he was chosen in the Graduate Fellow category.