I teach nineteenth-century British literature in all genres and modes. I regularly teach classes about Romantic poetry, the aesthetic concept of the sublime, literary representations of London, the comedic novel, and stories of action and adventure. I have published two scholarly books, the first about poets who were activists against the British monarchy in the nineteenth century, the second about strategies of poetic realism in the work of John Clare and poets who were inspired by him.

I have a number of research projects afoot at the moment. I'm interested in the relationship between music and poetry, especially as they connect in popular song. In a way, this research is an extension of a very longstanding fascination on my part with sound, a fascination that started with an article about listening to birdsong. I keep asking, how do poets depict moments of listening to real sounds in the world, and what's the relation between those depictions and the sensory experiences poems invite readers to have as we enunciate the words on the page, whether silently in our minds or aloud with our bodies?

Two projects relate to time: one about how literary representations of farm labor credit it with yielding a deep sense of daily and seasonal time ("At Home in the Working Countryside"), the other about how the liturgical year organized sacred time for observant Christians. I'm wondering about how regular activities such as farm work and religious observance heightened, shaped, and complicated what we often think of as a uniform "modern" experience of time.

Another project involves various modes of English-to-English translation. Usually these translations involve gaps in time or space. I've written about verse paraphrases of the King James Bible, and I hope to write something soon about Wordsworth's modernizations of Chaucer. The translations in space that intrigue me move from regional dialects, Scots and Scottish English, and specialized jargons and sociolects into standard English. All these English-to-English translations seem to me forays into and out of a "sister tongue," a language that is not-quite-foreign but also not-quite-native. I am trying to understand how these forays shaped the language of poetry in the nineteenth century and beyond.

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

“On Clare and Lyric Song,” Cambridge Companion to John Clare (forthcoming).

“ 'Sea Songs Love Ballads &c &c &c’: John Clare and Vernacular Song,” Palgrave Advances in John Clare Studies, ed. Simon Kövesi and Erin Lafford (Cham, Switzerland, 2020), 61-85.

“At Home in the Working Countryside: Clare’s Metaphysics of Agricultural Labor,” Romanticism 26.2 (July 2020): 128-38.

 “Clare’s manuscript translations of Byron and the Bible,” SEL: Studies in English Literature 58.4 (Autumn 2018): 877-97.

"John Clare's Speaking Voices: Dialect, Orality, and the Intermedial Poetic Text," Essays in Romanticism 25.1 (2018): 85-100.

"Exemplary figures in Clare's descriptive poems," John Clare Society Journal 36 (2017): 57-66.

"Geoffrey Grigson's Embrace of Influence," Review of English Studies 68.287 (2017): 968-85.

Clare's Lyric: John Clare and Three Modern Poets (Oxford UP, 2014). The three modern poets are Arthur Symons, Edmund Blunden, and John Ashbery.

“Minds and Bodies,” Oxford Companion to Victorian Poetry, ed. Matthew Bevis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

“On the Publication of John Clare’s The Rural Muse, 1835,” BRANCH: Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-Century History, ed. Dino Franco Felluga (2012), at http://www.branchcollective.org/?ps_articles=stephanie-kuduk-weiner-on-the-publication-of-john-clares-the-rural-muse

"Knowledge and Sense Experience in Swinburne's Late Poetry," in A.C. Swinburne and the Singing Word, ed. Yisrael Levin (Ashgate, 2010).

"Listening with John Clare," Studies in Romanticism (Fall 2009).

"Sight and Sound in the Poetic World of Ernest Dowson," Nineteenth-Century Literature 60: 4 (March 2006): 481-509.

Republican Politics and English Poetry, 1789-1874 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).

"Victorian Poetry as Victorian Studies," Victorian Poetry 41: 4 (Winter 2003): 513-18.

"A Sword of a Song': Swinburne's Republican Aesthetics," Victorian Studies 43: 2 (Winter 2001): 253-79.

"Sedition, Chartism, and Epic Poetry in Thomas Cooper's Purgatory of Suicides," Victorian Poetry 39: 2 (Summer 2001): 165-86.