Bruhn's first love in literature was Romantic poetry in general and Wordsworth’s in particular, so almost everything he's produced as a scholar bears some relation to this period and its poetry, including his monographWordsworth Before Coleridge(Routledge, 2018) as well as his contributions toCognition, Literature, and History(Routledge, 2014), which he coedited with Donald Wehrs,The OxfordHandbook of William Wordsworth(2015), the de GruyterHandbook of British Romanticism(2017), andThe Palgrave Handbook of Affect Studies and Textual Criticism(2017). Literary-critical essays on English literature from Chaucer to Margaret Atwood have appeared in such journals asThe Chaucer Review,European Romantic Review,Poetics Today,Studies in Philology, Studies in Romanticism, andThe Wallace Stevens Journal.
With a study of deixis published in 2005, Bruhn's research took a turn toward what might be called “historical cognitive poetics,” which aims to assess what and how exactly historical theories, practices, and interpretations of literature may contribute to present-day cognitive and empirical literary studies. His most recent study in this vein, published inScientific Study of Literaturein 2018, involves citation analysis of the historical record of professional literary interpretation in order to reveal and understand the textual bases of literariness.
