Biography

David Russell arrived at UCLA in 2023; he was previously Associate Professor of English at the University of Oxford (2015-2023) and Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature at King’s College London (2013-2015). He has held postdoctoral fellowships at the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at Columbia University, and the Mahindra Center for the Humanities at Harvard University.

His first book, Tact, is about the development in nineteenth-century Britain of a new mode of feeling one’s way with others in complex modern conditions. The book traces how the essay genre came to exemplify this sensuous new ethic and aesthetic. It argues that the essay form provided the resources for the performance of tact and analyses its techniques in the writings of Charles Lamb, John Stuart Mill, Matthew Arnold, George Eliot, and Walter Pater. Offering fresh approaches to thinking about criticism, sociability, politics, and art, Tact concludes by following a legacy of essayistic tact to the practice of twentieth-century British psychoanalysts like D. W. Winnicott and Marion Milner.

Professor Russell’s second book is about the twentieth-century British psychoanalyst, essayist and artist, Marion Milner. It analyses Milner’s visual and literary styles together, in order to explore the role of creativity in the development of what we now call “mental health”. The book provides a history of psychoanalytic ideas in Britain at what was a very rich moment of thinking about what people might require in order to live a good life.

The task of “facing reality” forms the basis of Russell’s third and current project. It considers how critics and novelists, philosophers and psychoanalysts, from the eighteenth century to the present, enjoin us to think about how our lives come to feel real. At the present time, when critics have diagnosed a reality deficit, or noted that people seem to be living in different, non-communicating realties from one another, the project considers some genealogies and alternatives to this process.

Professor Russell is also working on a short book on vulgarity, and what literary criticism has to say about it.

At UCLA, Professor Russell teaches courses on nineteenth-century literature, critical prose, psychoanalysis, queer theory and interdisciplinary approaches to literature, film, philosophy and the visual arts.

Education

• BA, Modern History and English, University of Oxford (2004)
• PhD, English, Princeton University (2011)

Publications

Books

Marion Milner: On Creativity, (Oxford University Press, 2024)

Tact: Aesthetic Liberalism and the Essay Form in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Princeton, 2018)

Essays, Articles and Chapters

“Facing Reality in Middlemarch; or, How to get into the World” Routledge Companion to George Eliot ed. Margaret Harris and Matthew Sussman (in press; forthcoming 2027)

“Hazlitt and the Hatred of Criticism,” The Hazlitt Review vol. 17 (2025)

“Analysis and Acting Out: Freud and Armstrong,” Genre vol.58 issue 1 (April 2025)

“Feeling Real: Psychoanalysis and the Essay,” The Cambridge History of the British Essay ed. Denise Gigante and Jason Childs (Cambridge University Press, 2024)

“Ethics and the Essay,” The Cambridge Companion to the Essay ed. Kara Wittman and Evan Kindley (Cambridge University Press, 2023)

“Facing Reality: Aesthetic Education and Human Flourishing,” Literature and Human Flourishing, ed. James English and Heather Love, (Oxford University Press, 2023)

“How to Face Reality: Ruskin, Freud and Winnicott,” Raritan (Winter 2021) Vol 40 no 3

Introduction to George Eliot, Middlemarch (Oxford World’s Classics, 2019)

“The Idea of Matthew Arnold” in Thinking Through Style: Non-Fiction Prose of the Long Nineteenth Century ed. Hurley and Waithe, (OUP, 2018)

“Stupid Like Tennyson,” Raritan, Vol. 35 No 1 (2015)

“Aesthetic Liberalism: John Stuart Mill as Essayist” Victorian Studies, Vol. 56 no. 1 (Autumn 2014), 7-30