Rate My Professor Thomas McLean

Thomas McLean is Professor of English in the English and Linguistics Programme at the University of Otago, within the School of Arts and Division of Humanities. He earned his BA from Loyola University, MA from Boston College, and PhD from the University of Iowa. McLean's academic career at Otago encompasses teaching undergraduate and postgraduate courses including ENGL 335 Romantic Literature, ENGL 313 Victorian Literature, ENGL 341 Irish-Scots Gothic and the Gothic as Genre, ENGL 220 Creative Writing: Reading for Writers, and ENGL 404 Writing for Publication. He supervises theses in nineteenth-century British and American literature. His research specializations are Romanticism, nineteenth-century literature and culture, the historical novel, and literature and nationalism, with emphasis on British women writers, representations of Poland and the Ottoman Empire, and the Porter family.

McLean has authored the monograph The Other East and Nineteenth-Century British Literature: Imagining Poland and the Russian Empire (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), edited Further Letters of Joanna Baillie (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2010), published Nobody's Argument: Jane Porter and the Historical Novel (2007), and co-edited with Ruth Knezevich Jane Porter's Thaddeus of Warsaw (Edinburgh University Press, 2019). Additional contributions include chapters on Kosciuszko in British literature and articles in journals such as Keats-Shelley Journal and Harvard Library Bulletin. His achievements include the Frances Browne Award (2024), University of Otago Prestigious Writing Grant (2025) for editing Frances Browne’s Legends of Ulster, Marsden Fund Grant (2014–2017) for Global Romantics: How the Porter Family Changed Nineteenth-Century Art and Literature, New York Public Library Short-Term Research Fellowship (2011), Australian National University Humanities Research Centre Fellowship (2011), James M. Osborn Fellowship at Yale's Beinecke Library (2006), and Houghton Mifflin Fellowship at Harvard's Houghton Library (2005). In September 2025, he delivered his Inaugural Professorial Lecture, “Reading with Pictures: Adventures in Nineteenth-Century Art and Literature.” McLean's editorial, curatorial, and supervisory roles enhance scholarship on nineteenth-century literary networks and cross-cultural exchanges.