• "Crossing the Line: Blasphemy, Time, and Anonymity" 
  Qui Parle 22.2 (2014)
• "Common Quiet: Tolerance Around 1688"
  ELH, Fall 2012
• "Shelly After Atheism"
  Studies in Romanticism, Winter 2010
• "The Demands of the Day" 
  Pedagogy 10.1, 2010
• Secularism, Cosmopolitanism, and Romanticism
  a special volume of Romantic Circles Praxis (2008)
• "A Poetics of Dissent; or, Pantisocracy in America" 
  Theory and Event 10.1, 2007
• "After the Secular: The Subject of Romanticism" 
  Public Culture 18.2, Spring 2006
• "Mansfield Park and the End of Natural Theology" 
  Modern Language Quarterly 63.1, March 2002

Professor Jager writes and teaches about romantic literature, politics, and culture, about secularism and religion, and about cognitive science. He is the author of articles on all of these topics, published  in The Wordsworth Circle, Qui Parle, ELH, Studies in Romanticism, Pedagogy, Romantic Circles Praxis, Public Culture, and elsewhere. From 2006-2008 he was co-leader of the “Mind and Culture” seminar at the CCA; for 2013-2014 he was co-leader of the “Objects and Environments” seminar at the CCA.  In 2017-2018 he was Interim Chair of the Department of English; he is currently the Interim Director of the Center for Cultural Analysis.  From August - December 2018 he is the Leverhulme Visiting Professor at Lancaster University, England.  He is the author of two books: The Book of God: Secularization and Design in the Romantic Era (2007), and Unquiet Things: Secularism in the Romantic Age (2015). The first studies the ubiquitous presence of the argument from design in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, arguing that its cultural and aesthetic importance undermines the familiar equation of modernization with secularization. The second emphasizes secularism rather than religion as its primary analytic category, and proposes that romantic-era literary writing possesses a distinctive ability to register the discontents that characterize the mood of secular modernity. Professor Jager is working on several new projects: a collection of his writing on religion and literature, provisionally titled Unsettled, a longer book on the political possibilities of romanticism, entitled Careless Steps, and a shorter book on consciousness and ontology and their current theoretical manifestations.  

• Seminar: The Two Cultures
• Seminar: Romanticism and Politics
• Seminar: Secularism and Romanticism
• Seminar: Literature, Religion, and Theory
• Principles of Literary Study
• British Literature 1800-Present
• Early Romantic Literature
• Later Romantic Literature
• Children’s Literature

• Romanticism and Consciousness
• The Politics of Romanticism
• Romanticism and Epistemology
• Secularism from the Enlightenment to Romanticism
• Writings of the British Romantic Period
• The Political Possibilities of Romanticism (at Columbia University)

PhD, University of Michigan, 2000
BA, Calvin College, 1994

• "Romanticism, Reflexivity, Design," an interview with Colin Jager at The Immanent Frame
• "Machiavellian Minds: A Report from the CCA" by Colin Jager (Future Traditions Magazine, Issue 1)

Leverhulme Visiting Professor of English, Lancaster University, UK, August - December 2018.