William Coker is a comparative literature scholar focused primarily on European literature of the Romantic era in connection with German philosophy from Immanuel Kant to Theodor Adorno. He has published articles in journals such as Comparative Literature, Criticism, Eighteenth-century Fiction, and Religion and Literature on a variety of topics including alienation, the interplay of myth and rationality, and the efficacy of critique. His chapters in edited collections address Romantic humor and the afterlives of English Romantic literature in Turkey. His book, Dialectics of the Romantic Novel: Self-Estrangement, Mediation, and Narrative Form (Liverpool University Press, 2026, forthcoming) argues for the centrality of dialectical thought to the emergence of the Romantic-era novel in Europe. With individual chapters on Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Hölderlin, Jean Paul, Mary Shelley, and Johann Wolfgang Goethe, the book traces how the novel emerged as the genre most capable of embracing the emancipatory potential of contradiction.