Peter Otto

Peter Otto serves as the Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Melbourne and as Executive Director of the Enlightenment, Romanticism, and Contemporary Culture (ERCC) Research Unit within the School of Culture and Communication, Faculty of Arts. A Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities since 2004, he previously held the position of ARC Research Professor (DORA) at the same institution. Otto has published extensively on William Blake, Gothic fictions, dark Romanticism, popular entertainments, the prehistory of virtual reality, Romanticism and contemporary culture, the history of imagination and imagination-machines, the pasts and futures of virtual reality, the post-secular, and exchanges between architecture, fiction, imagination, and experience. His scholarship connects Enlightenment and Romantic traditions to modern phenomena, including virtual realities and biopolitics, influencing interdisciplinary studies through leadership of the ERCC, which addresses themes such as critique, creativity, comparison, actual, mixed and virtual realities, and non-European enlightenments and romanticisms.

Key publications include Multiplying Worlds: Romanticism, Modernity, and the Emergence of Virtual Reality (Oxford University Press, 2011); William Blake: Selected Works in the 21st Century Oxford Authors series (Oxford University Press, 2018); 'Innovations in Encompassing Large Scenes', an online exhibition in the Romantic Circles Gallery of Visual Culture (2013); 'The Horrors of Creation: Globes, Englobing Powers, and Blake's Archaeologies of the Present' in William Blake's Gothic Imagination (Manchester University Press, 2018); 'William Blake, the Secularization of Religious Categories, and the History of Imagination' in Constructing Nineteenth-Century Religion (Ohio State University Press, 2019); 'The Ends of Illustration: Explanation, Critique, and the Political Imagination in Blake's Title-pages for Genesis' in Romanticism and Illustration (Cambridge University Press, 2019); 'William Blake, the Ancient Gnostics, and the Birth of Modern Gnosticism' in The Gnostic World (Routledge, 2019); ''Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age!': Ōe Kenzaburō and William Blake on Bodies, Biopolitics, and the Imagination' in British Romanticism in Asia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019); ''Second birth' and Gothic fictions in Matthew Lewis's The Monk, Catherine Blake's 'Agnes', and William Blake's Vala or The Four Zoas' in William Blake: Modernity and Disaster (University of Toronto Press, 2020); 'Light, moonlight, darkness and the world' in NGV Triennial 2020 (National Gallery of Victoria, 2020); 'Looking 'thro ... & not with the Eye: From Romanticism to the Counter Culture, Rock and Roll, and the Anthropocene' in European Romantic Review (2020); and 'Negotiating the 'Holy Land': Cross-Cultural Encounters from Bonaparte to Blake' in Postcolonial Studies (2020). He is consultant editor of The Victorian Popular Culture Portal: Spiritualism, Sensation, and Magic.

Professional Email: peterjo@unimelb.edu.au