Samuel specialises in Anglophone literature and culture of the early modern period and eighteenth century. He also does comparative work in Spanish and Portuguese. His research uncovers ways people imagined their identity from the early colonial period though Romanticism.
Samuel’s first book project, The Maritime Travel Book and the Collective Imagination, traces how people imagined what it meant to be part of a “we” as they wrote and read colonial-era tales of voyages. His 2025 article in PMLA is adapted from this work; a related project appeared in Women Writers in Context in 2019. He is now busy with a new book on personal identity and material culture, building on a 2019 article in Eighteenth-Century Fiction. He has also written more broadly on new materialist scholarship in Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory and in reviews for other journals.
Samuel teaches FHS Paper 4 and Paper 5 and is available for dissertation supervision. Before coming to Oxford, he was a postdoctoral research fellow at Jesus College, University of Cambridge; an adjunct professor of English at Emmanuel College, Boston; and a Preceptor of Expository Writing at Harvard University, where he received his PhD in 2022.
