Expertise & Publications

James’s courses and international lectures invite students and audiences to see nineteenth-century literature as a living dialogue with the present. Whether teaching British Romanticism, Victorian prose, or the ethics of imagination, he brings clarity and warmth to discussions that connect art, belief, and human experience.

James Najarian’s scholarship examines the moral and aesthetic questions that shaped British Romantic and Victorian literature. His research connects poetry, gender, and religion, revealing how writers used literary form to think through issues of beauty, faith, and identity that still resonate today.

As the author of The Goat Songs, winner of the Vassar Miller Prize, James writes poetry that blends thought and emotion with quiet precision. His work reflects on faith, memory, and belonging, turning personal experience into meditations on art and spirituality.

James Najarian’s fiction explores faith, identity, and moral choice through the lens of everyday life. His stories, published in venues such as America and The Hyephen, trace moments when the ordinary becomes luminous.

As editor of this international Brill journal, James fosters interdisciplinary dialogue among scholars, artists, and theologians. Under his direction, the journal has become a forum for exploring how artistic practice shapes, and is shaped by, spiritual vision.

James Najarian contributes his expertise as a reviewer for academic presses and leading journals. His thoughtful critiques champion emerging scholarship at the crossroads of theology, aesthetics, and literary history.

James's research traces the evolution of Romantic ideals through the Victorian and modern eras. By examining how later poets reimagined Romantic themes in light of social and scientific change, Najarian illuminates the persistence of beauty and belief in an age of doubt.

In his studies of writers such as Keats, Arnold, and Hemans, James Najarian investigates how gender and self-presentation inform artistic vision. His work shows how nineteenth-century conceptions of masculinity and femininity continue to influence our understanding of creativity and moral expression.

James's work explores how artistic structure mirrors spiritual conviction. The discipline of form, its rhythm, proportion, and restraint, becomes a way of thinking about ethical and devotional life.