David  Smith

Biography

David Smith grew up in Oregon and after spending some years in Missouri, returned to graduate school at Baylor University. After receiving a doctorate in British Romantic Literature in 2017, David spent the next few years teaching at Baylor, University of Central Oklahoma, and Creighton University before coming to USAO in 2023.

Research, Presentations & Publications

“The Gothic Gospel: America’s Religious Transformation in Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland.” Gothic Studies. Vol. 18, Issue 2, November 2016.

“‘he who made the Lamb’”: Catechistic Subversion as Aesthetic Transformation in Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience.” Essays in Romanticism, Vol. 27, Issue 1 (Spring 2020): 61-82.

“‘Vampiric Transgression and Fin-de-Siècle Conflicts in Coleridge’s Christabel.” Coleridge Bulletin: The Journal of the Friends of Coleridge. New Series 56, Winter 2020.

“‘living shapes that move from mind to mind’: Tolkien’s Visual Romanticism.” The Romantic Spirit in the Works of J.R.R. Tolkien, ed. Julian Eilmann & Will Sherwood. The Cormarë Series.

“Fury of Dracula: Board Games as Participatory Pedagogy.” MLA Approaches to Teaching World Literature: Approaches to Teaching Bram Stoker's Dracula, ed. William Thomas McBride. Modern Language Association, 2025: 167-174.

“Fragments of Time, Technological Ghosts, and Gothic Narrative in Horizon: Zero Dawn.” Victorians and Videogames, ed. Lin Young and Brooke Cameron. Routledge Press, 2025: 203-219.

“Poetic Anxiety and Exorcism in T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets.” Poetry and the Gothic, Samantha Landau, Li-hsin Hsu, and Thomas Leonard D. Shaw, editors. (Forthcoming)

Presentations

“What Can Romantic Poetry Teach Christian artists and educators about AI?” Baylor Symposium on Faith and Culture, “Technology and the Human Person in the Age of AI.” Baylor University. Waco, TX. February 26-28, 2026.

“Sympathetic Imagination in Romantic Poetry: Promoting the Human(e) in the age of ChatGPT and Social Media.” Rocky Mountain MLA. Spokane, WA. October 2025.

“‘a blindness of spirit which comes from age’: Recapturing Childish Wonder in Lord Dunsany’s The King of Elfland’s Daughter.” "Growing Younger": Literature and Child-like Faith. Southeast Conference on Christianity and Literature. Covenant College, Lookout Mountain, Geogia. October 10-12, 2024.

““When I see his work, my soul is taken to a world of stars’: Blake as an Influence on Manga”.” Global Blake: Afterlives in Art, Literature and Music. University of Lincoln. Lincoln, United Kingdom. January 2022.

“Waxen Cylinders: Victorian Anxieties and the Technology of Memory in Bram Stoker’s Dracula.” Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies. Southern Methodist University. Dallas, TX. March 2019.

“Poetic Liturgies, Porous Individuals: Romanticism and Christian Eco-Ethics in Wordsworth’s Ecclesiastical Sonnets.” “Stewardship of Creation” Conference; Institute of Faith and Learning. Baylor University. Waco, TX. October 2018.

“Female Ventriloquism as Radical Subversion in Blake’s Europe: A Prophecy.” International Conference on Romanticism. University of Texas-El Paso. October 26-29, 2017.

“SET: Teaching with the Special Collections.” Armstrong-Browning Library Teaching Fellows Presentation. Academy of Teaching and Learning. January 2017.

“The Gothic Gospel: America’s Religious Transformation in Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland.” South Central Modern Language Association. Nashville, TN. November 2015

“Creative Corrosion: Printmaking and Swedenborgian Theories in Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.” North American Society for the Study of Romanticism. Washington D.C. July 2014.