Betsy Winakur Tontiplaphol’s research focuses on nineteenth-century English literature, especially Romantic and Victorian poetry. She is the author of two scholarly books: Poetics of Luxury in the Nineteenth Century: Keats, Tennyson, and Hopkins and The Pointe of the Pen: Nineteenth-Century Poetry and the Balletic Imagination. Tontiplaphol is also interested in how lyric forms and traditions manifest in contemporary culture; she co-edited The Literary Taylor Swift: Songwriting and Intertextuality, the first academic collection to treat Swift as a writer.
The charismatic poet John Keats has long been a central figure in Tontiplaphol’s scholarship. Her writing about Keats has considered the Keats biopic Bright Starin relationship to the rise of Etsy; described a service-learning project that she assigns in her Keats seminar; and examined Keats’s refusal to idealize childhood. Tontiplaphol has also written about Keats’s nineteenth-century contemporaries (such as William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, and Percy Shelley) and inheritors.