BARS is pleased to announce the relaunch of its conference and seminar support scheme. Applicants may apply for up to £500 from BARS to support seminar and conference activities. The… Read more »
I am pleased to announce that issue 62 of the BARS Review has now been published and can be viewed here: https://www.bars.ac.uk/review/index.php/barsreview. Many thanks to all who contributed! The BARS Review publishes timely reviews of… Read more »
The BARS Review is the review journal of the British Association for Romantic Studies, providing timely and comprehensive coverage of new monographs, essay collections, editions and other works dealing with the literature, history… Read more »
Given the reliance of so many Romanticism scholars on digital research throughout the pandemic, it felt like a good time to update this list of online resources from 2020. This… Read more »
From the meadow pipits, skylarks and standing stones of Ilkley Moor to the river at Saltaire where he met his end, a new audio documentary from the University of Leeds’ Cultural Collections unearths the chaotic, charismatic story of Bingley’s forgotten working-class poet.
Known as The Airedale Poet, The Orpheus of Bradford and The Bingley Byron, John Nicholson spent most of his life in the lowly day job of woolsorter; went from Methodist preacher to the depths of addiction, twice; got arrested in London for arguing with a bust of Shakespeare; became a pawn in one of the great political spats of the 19th century; played the oboe; fathered nine children; and ad-libbed untold quantities of rhyme for his mates in the pub, most of which has been lost to intoxication and the passage of time.
His fame briefly reached as far as London and, although he never had the fleeting success of his contemporary ‘Peasant Poet’ John Clare, he was a celebrity in Yorkshire’s West Riding, laureate of both the moors and the burgeoning textile mills and iron works of the Industrial Revolution. After his untimely death on the banks of the Aire at Saltaire on the morning of Good Friday 1843, a crowd of a thousand turned up to his funeral. Queen Victoria apparently contributed to the support of his widow and orphans.
Dr Adam Bridgen, Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow in Durham’s Department of English Studies, contributed historical and literary context to the series. In an interview with Durham University, Dr Bridgen said:
What first drew me to Nicholson (1790-1843) was the combination of his extraordinary local reputation and his relative obscurity today. As a wool-sorter his poetry emerged directly from the industrial and rural landscapes of West Yorkshire, and yet his drowning in poverty, in the Aire river marked a tragic end to a remarkably active life and wide range of topics he wrote upon for local audiences as well as wealthy industrial patrons. That combination made him a fascinating subject both as a poet and as a historical figure.
I hope that this series, and the surprising level of interest we’ve received — being listed among the ‘Best Podcasts of the Week’ at the Guardian — will draw more radio and sound producers towards recovering the local and literary lives of working-class poets. They are an important but unfairly overlooked part of our literary and cultural heritage, and also offer important ways of thinking about our connection to nature and the processes which have gradually distanced us from it. My more ambitious hope is that podcasts like this will also inform how we might improve our relationship with nature going forwards, supporting the work of ‘Right to Roam’ writer-activists like Guy Shrubsole and Nick Hayes.
Infrastructure – manifesting in roads, transport systems, energy supply systems, waste management, and information and communication networks – is integral to the organisation of modern societies. While infrastructures have often been presented as mere physical and functional structures ‘below’ or ‘underneath’ (infra) a society, recent research in anthropology, political science, science and technology studies, cultural history, and environmental and energy humanities has complicated this view, with Lauren Berlant even speaking of infrastructure as “the living mediation of what organizes life” (2016). For example, scholars now emphasise that infrastructures both shape and are shaped by economic and political power, structure cultural practices, transform non-human ecologies, and require not only construction but also ongoing maintenance.
Although the term infrastructure was not yet in use, the Romantic period deserves scholarly attention in this context, as it witnessed both the modification of existing infrastructures and the ‘promise’ (Anand et.al. 2018) and development of new ones. Key transitions such as the introduction of steam-powered transportation;the improvement of the postal service and mail coaches;the construction of canals, bridges, and dams; the macadamisation of public roads; and the rise of the tourism and hospitality industry reconfigured the material, social, and cultural landscape. Romantic writers and artists engaged with these developments, imbuing infrastructures with meaning and mediating affective, critical, and speculative responses to them, not least by drawing on aesthetic discourse (‘sublime’, ‘picturesque’ etc.). While contributions by Miranda Burgess (2010), Michele Speitz (2024), and Daniel E. White (2024) have introduced the concept of infrastructure into Romantic studies, much remains to be explored. This conference seeks to provide a forum for investigating the multiple dimensions of Romantic infrastructures.
Drawing on Brian Larkin’s deliberately broad and inclusive definition of infrastructure as “built networks that facilitate the flow of goods, people, or ideas and allow for their exchange over space” (2013, 328), we invite 20-minute contributions that address but are, of course, not limited to the following aspects:
– Infrastructures (i.e. substructures) as a representational challenge: questions of habit and in/visibility; novelty and scale – Representations of social equity and inequity associated with or perpetuated by infrastructure (e.g. impacts along lines of gender, sexuality, race, and class) – Visual and verbal representations of infrastructures’ entanglement with non- human nature – Representations of infrastructures in the context of empire and colonialism – Depictions of infrastructures as enabling mobility and tourism in travel literature – Political and cultural representations of infrastructures shaping concepts of progress – Crises, breakdowns and disruptions of infrastructures (e.g. accidents, war, natural disasters): representational affordances and modes of modelling – Infrastructures catalysing philosophical inquiry (e.g. regarding experience and agency, as well as human and planetary history) – Spatio-temporal qualities of infrastructures in relation to literary and cultural form (e.g. traces of the past (recent, medieval, Roman), visions of the future, changing rhythms and accelerations, non-synchronicity – Cultural appreciations of infrastructures’ roles and impacts on knowledge economies – Infrastructures supporting cultural and literary production (e.g. publishing, libraries, literary societies, academies of the arts and sciences)
Date and Time: Saturday, 21 November 2026, 6:00 – 9:00 pm (GMT)
Location: online
Please join members of the Baillie Working Group for a virtual public reading of Baillie’s The Family Legend, organised by Sarah Burdett and Diane Piccitto. Attendance is free.
Additional chapter proposals are invited for Mary Shelley’s The Last Man and Global Issues, an edited collection examining the political, racial, and pandemic-related questions raised by Shelley’s novel.
The collection seeks to situate discussion of The Last Man within the literary traditions and historical debates of its time, while considering its relevance to global issues. It brings different critical readings into conversation, exploring how the novel represents disease, national identity, colonial relationships, and the vulnerabilities of human societies.
We welcome contributions engaging with postcolonial studies, medical humanities, biopolitics, disability studies, and related approaches. Chapters should offer an argument grounded in close reading and relevant scholarship. Comparative studies are welcome where The Last Man remains central to the discussion.
Possible topics include:
Disease, plague, and the political dimensions of public health.
Race, national identity, and representations of cultural difference.
Empire, colonial relationships, and slavery.
War, political ambition, and social responsibility.
Disability, exclusion, and belonging.
Gender and the representation of vulnerability.
Geographical boundaries, movement, and the spread of disease.
The Last Man in relation to other eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literary works.
The possibilities and limitations of reading the novel alongside contemporary global crises.
The collection aims to develop a scholarly dialogue between different interpretations of the novel. Contributions should make their critical position clear and explain how their analysis advances understanding of Shelley’s work. Discussions of contemporary issues should attend to historical differences as well as connections.
Submission guidelines
Please send a proposed chapter title, an abstract of 250–300 words, and a biography of approximately 100 words to reyam.rammahi@gmail.com by November 13, 2026.
Completed chapters should be approximately 8,000–10,000 words, including notes and Works Cited, and follow MLA style.
Submissions must be original and unpublished. All contributions will be subject to editorial assessment and the publisher’s review requirements.
This Stephen Copley Research Award could not have come at a better time. Having completed most of the chapters of my doctoral thesis, I now faced the challenge of a new phase in my research: extensive archival work. I study the early evangelical novel and its subtle sociopolitical leanings, so until this point, my research had centred on readily accessible primary sources from the long eighteenth century. Having pored over texts from three diverse disciplines – literature, political philosophy, and theology – I was now left with the task of following up my research on these novels with an exploration of their contemporary reception. For this, I knew I needed to consult specific archives. In June 2026, I was honoured and thrilled to receive a BARS Stephen Copley Research Award to do just that.
The Firestone Library at Princeton University, where I consulted extensive collections of American and British periodicals of the long eighteenth century.
My archival journey started a bit earlier, over velvety pages carefully housed in Oxford’s Bodleian and the British Library. During that time, I began developing a framework for the British reception of these evangelical novels, all written by and for women. It became evident that many contemporaries noted – as I did – the subtle radical ideals within them. Being an American, I began to wonder if this response was shared beyond Britain, specifically within a republican print culture.
This led me to my current project: the transatlantic sociopolitical reception of British early evangelical novels. These novels, first published between 1790 and 1820, are primarily didactic in purpose and adhere to the main tenets of evangelical theology. While modern scholarship has largely characterised them as conservative, my tri-disciplinary analysis reveals that the novels address questions of agency, authority, and societal intervention in ways that complicate this assumption, largely as a result of their specifically evangelical tenets. My project examines a number of once best-selling evangelical novels, including Mary Brunton’s Self-Control (1811) and Discipline (1814), Harriet Corp’s An Antidote to the Miseries of Human Life (1807) and its Sequel (1809), and Hannah More’s Coelebs in Search of a Wife (1808).[1] While reception of these novels is most commonly found in British journals, such as The Monthly Review and The Critical Review, the novels were also quickly reprinted and circulated in the United States; thus, reception extended beyond the British marketplace to the American marketplace. My hope is that this research will provide a better understanding of how women’s religious fiction was received transatlantically, across distinct political cultures, and how it engaged with sociopolitical ideals through the nineteenth century.
I soon discovered that the best places to access early American editions of these novels, along with the periodicals that reviewed them, were the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books, and Manuscripts at the University of Pennsylvania and the Firestone Library and its Special Collections at Princeton University. Penn holds various early American editions of my project’s novels, published mostly in Philadelphia and Boston, while Princeton offers extensive American and British periodical holdings, particularly in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century materials. Also, conducting research at the Kislak Center would – and, happily, did – provide me with the opportunity to consult complementary print materials and newspapers at the nearby Library Company of Philadelphia, the American Philosophical Society, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, and the Athenaeum of Philadelphia, which are likewise rich in resources.
The Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books, and Manuscripts at the University of Pennsylvania, where I consulted early American editions of British evangelical novels.
Finally, the time arrived to take my trip. It was a beautiful week in mid-September – not quite autumn – but the air already held the familiar scent of vibrant fallen leaves. Walking through the streets of Princeton and Philadelphia and up the steps of long-loved libraries, I sat among various American volumes, editions, and imprints of British evangelical novels. It is always a privilege to hold something so old, especially when it is housed in a building steeped in its own history. As I moved from one archive to the next and ran my fingers over the carefully penned owner inscriptions, I thought of the many before me who must have scoured and treasured the very pages of these books.
The title page of Amelia Opie’s evangelical novel Valentine’s Eve (1816), published in Boston and Philadelphia, featuring a handwritten ownership inscription apparently reading “E. C. Heward of Jamaica.” Held at the Library Company of Philadelphia.
Archival research yielded some fascinating results and revealed the various ways in which American reviewers engaged with the sociopolitical implications of British evangelical novels. In New York’s Christian Inquirer, a reviewer suggests that More’s Coelebs is morally admirable but intellectually limited because, unlike America and its “republican equality,” Britain lacks a social conscience, specifically due to its disregard for female education and its continued attachment to traditional social hierarchies.[2] Consequently, the review uses More’s novel to criticise traditional British social systems and practices. In Greater Boston’s General Repository and Review, the reviewer of Self-Control notes: “We cannot but approve the intention of the author to recommend habits of self-government,” thus indicating that evangelical moral discourse and republican political ideals, such as individual autonomy, could converge in American reception.[3] Interestingly, some reviews identify aspects of these novels as excessively radical. In Philadelphia’s Port Folio, the reviewer condemns Ellen’s behaviour in Discipline as shockingly “manly”: “A young lady of seventeen, driving a pair of spirited horses, ‘Jehu like,’ may, possibly, excite no surprise on the other side of the Atlantic; but, in our less adulterated land, it would be an invasion of the ‘rights of man,’ not less ridiculous than disgusting.”[4] Here, the reviewer questions unconventional female agency in Britain, justifying his criticism by invoking the “rights of man”; in doing so, this review illustrates how the language of republican liberty could ironically reinforce, as opposed to challenge, conventional gender boundaries.
These discoveries have given me much to consider about the ways in which British evangelical novels were understood, received, and even reinterpreted across the Atlantic, particularly within the distinct political culture of the early American republic. While there is yet more work to be done on this fascinating topic, I am deeply grateful to BARS for allowing me to continue in that work through this generous award. I am also grateful to the many helpful librarians and archivists whose care of these invaluable primary materials provides a space for both questions and answers to take form.
Rachel Xhemajli is a doctoral candidate at the University of Oxford. Her DPhil research examines the early evangelical novel in Britain, its political implications, and its cultural impact in the long eighteenth century. Her broader research interests centre on how classic literature shapes contemporary thought and public discourse. She is an English lecturer at Alvernia University.
Photos courtesy of Rachel Xhemajli.
[1] The above titles have been shortened. The full titles are as follows: Brunton’s Self-Control: A Novel (1811) and Discipline: A Novel (1814), Corp’s An Antidote to the Miseries of Human Life, In the History of the Widow Placid, and Her Daughter Rachel (1807) along with her A Sequel to the Antidote to the Miseries of Human Life, Containing a Further Account of Mrs. Placid and Her Daughter Rachel (1809), and More’s Coelebs in Search of a Wife: Comprehending Observations on Domestic Habits and Manners, Religion and Morals (1808).
[2] “Miss Hannah More’s Works – Coelebs in Search of a Wife; Tales and Allegories,” Christian Inquirer 11, no. 50 (1857), 1.
[3] “Article 4. Self-Control: A Novel,” General Repository and Review 1 (1812), 200.
[4] “Discipline: A Novel,” The Port Folio 1, no. 5 (1816), 416.
We are pleased to announce that the 2027 Friends of Coleridge Summer Conference will take place from July 26-29, 2027 at North London Collegiate School in Edgware, London. The conference will feature keynote lectures by Professor Seamus Perry (Oxford) and Professor Elizabeth Fay (UMass, Boston).
Papers should be 20 minutes in length about any aspect of Coleridge, his family, or his circle. A special issue of The Coleridge Bulletin will publish selected papers from the conference.
We invite you to submit a 300-word and a brief biographical note, to joanna.taylor@manchester.ac.uk and jacobzlloyd@gmail.com, by Friday 18th December 2026, with “Coleridge Conference Abstract” in the subject line. If you would like to be considered for a bursary, please briefly explain why. See the Call for Papers for further details.
Even as our understanding of the era and impact of Romantic-era writing has continued to evolve with work on manuscripts, materials and histories and voices from the margins. There is also a burgeoning discourse on the impact and legacies of British Romanticism beyond the geographical borders of Britain, particularly in wider Continental Europe and Asia.
Romantic Dialogues and Legacies at the Department of English Studies, Durham University welcomes 8 incredibly exciting speakers to give us papers on the expansive Romantic world beyond the confines of the British Isles over 2 sessions this November.
Session 1: 11 November, 2026, 16.30-18.30 UK Time
Speakers: Susan Valladares (Durham), Diego Saglia (Parma), Fran Marchionni (Zürich), James Dowthwaite (Mainz)
Session 2: 18 November, 2026, 15.00-17.00 UK Time
Speakers: Peter Kitson (Emeritus, East Anglia), Daniel E. White (Toronto), Jennifer Hargrave (Baylor), Roslyn Joy Irving (Mainz)
Postgraduate researchers and early career scholars working in Romantic Studies are invited to apply for a Stephen Copley Research Award. The BARS Executive Committee has established the bursaries in order to help fund research expenses up to a maximum of £500. Expenses may include but are not limited to the cost of travel and accommodation related to archival or research-focused trips, as well as photocopying, scanning, and childcare. Copley Awards cannot be used to cover presenting at or attending a conference. A postgraduate must be enrolled on a postgraduate research programme in the UK; an early career scholar is defined as someone who holds a PhD (from the UK) but has not held a permanent academic post for more than three years by the application deadline. Application for the awards is competitive, and cannot be made retrospectively.
Applicants must be members of BARS for their applications to be considered. Awards should normally be taken up within a year. The names of recipients will be announced on the BARS website and social media, and successful applicants will be asked to submit a short report to the BARS Executive Committee within four weeks of the completion of the research trip and to acknowledge BARS in their doctoral thesis and/or any publication; Reports may also be published on the BARS Blog where this is appropriate.
Previous winners or applicants are encouraged to apply again. However, previous winners are ineligible for a period of two years. For example, someone who received a Copley Award in the June 2025 round would not be eligible again until the June 2027 round. Everything else being equal, the panel will prioritise applicants who have not recently been awarded other BARS funding.
Your full name and institutional affiliation (if any).
The working title and a short abstract or summary of your PhD or current project.
A description of the research to be undertaken for which you need support. Please be as detailed and specific as possible regarding your proposed research. For example, if you intend to consult archival material, identify (where possible) the specific items/collections and state why consulting these is necessary for your project.
An estimated costing for the proposed research trip. Costs should clearly relate to the proposed activities. If driving is essential, please use UK Government rates to estimate mileage.
Estimated dates between which the research will be undertaken.
Details of current or recent funding (AHRC award, &c), if applicable.
The name of one supervisor/referee (with email address) to whom application can be made for a supporting reference on your behalf.
Applications and queries should be directed to the bursaries officer, Dr Gerard Lee McKeever (gerard.mckeever@ed.ac.uk) at the University of Edinburgh.
There are two rounds of the scheme in each year. The deadlines are June 1st and November 15th.
Matthew SangsterComments Off on Five Questions: Jonathan Gross on The European Byron
Jonathan Gross is Professor of English at DePaul University. He was Joint-President of the International Association of Byron Societies and is the author of Byron: The Erotic Liberal (Rowman and Littlefield, 2001). His other publications include The Life of Anne Damer (Bloomsbury, 2013); editions of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire’s The Sylph (Northwestern, 2007), Anne Damer’s Belmour (Northwestern, 2012), and Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire’s Emma, or the Unfortunate Attachment (SUNY, 2004); and Thomas Jefferson’s Scrapbooks (Steerforth, 2006). His monograph The European Byron: Mobility, Cosmopolitanism, and Chameleon Poetry, which we discuss below, was published by Anthem Press last year.
1) How did you first become interested in Byron’s European engagements?
Byron conferences in Gdansk, Athens, Venice, Paris, and Valladolid prompted research in specific areas. On one occasion, I was waiting for a vaporetto and saw Byron’s name inscribed on a plaque in Venice; that influenced the cover of my book. Henry James’ The Aspern Papers and even novels based on Byronic figures prompted further research. Prof. Gregory Dowling was a great help in securing a visit to Byron’s Palazzo Mocenigo, providing opportunities to share insights at conferences that he helped organize.
2) How did you arrive at the book’s structure, with the first half examining Byron’s debts to European writers, and the second focusing on Adam Mickiewicz and Alexander Pushkin?
The structure was the hardest thing. I wrote papers on Byron over a ten-year period, starting with Prof. Naji Oueijan’s conference in Lebanon, for which I penned the marginalia essay (influenced by Alex Watson’s Romantic Marginality [2016]). Though many monographs and edited collections have been assembled on Byron’s European influence, with distinct chapters written by specialists in the field (Paul Graham Trueblood’s Byron’s Political and Cultural Influence in Nineteenth‑Century Europe [1981], Richard Cardwell’s Lord Byron the European [1997], Peter Cochran’s Byron’s European Impact [2015] and Nic Panagopoulos’s excellent and overlooked edited volume The Place of Lord Byron in World History [2013]), they do not always engage with Byron’s influence in Poland and Russia, which brought up issues of whether these countries see themselves as part of Europe. That led to the further question of what is Europe? Byron wrote a poem entitled “Mazeppa” that has had such a rich history, inspiring Pushkin’s “Poltava” and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Mazepa. While specialists have much to say about a writer’s influence in a specific country, I wanted to take a cosmopolitan approach, and to see if that was possible after the Cold War. Prof. Maria Kalinowska helped arrange a lecture at the University of Warsaw which was crucial to the development of this book. I would be remiss if I did not thank Prof. Jerome McGann and Prof. Bernard Beatty, who read drafts and helped sharpen the structure, which was becoming dangerously inchoate.
3) What for you are the most important things we gain by considering Byron’s cosmopolitan European identity?
Byron’s ability to capture a country’s identity through a specific character—particularly his portrait of the Ukrainian hetman—offers a quicksilver history of Europe and how countries like Ukraine, Russia, and Poland were inspired by his nationalist example (“Who would be free themselves must strike the blow?/ Will Gaul or Muscovite redress ye? No!” [Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage 2:76]). The fact that he appealed to writers as distinct as Mickiewicz and Pushkin demonstrates his cosmopolitan appeal. Byron’s influence does not end in Italy or Greece. His “Vision of Judgement” showed how irreverent he could be towards George III; Pushkin, in turn, implicitly criticized czarist censorship of his works. Mickiewicz’s Forefathers’ Eve (1832) anticipates Pushkin’s “The Bronze Horseman” (1833), with both works addressing imperial power and Czar Peter the Great. Like no other British writer, perhaps, Byron inspired painters (Eugène Delacroix), musicians (Hector Berlioz), and sculptors (Bertel Thorwaldsen). In North America, Byron influenced Frederick Douglass’s The Heroic Slave, which includes epigraphs from Thomas Moore and Byron. During the Harlem Renaissance, many writers visited Pushkin’s statue, such as Langston Hughes, winning prizes named after the Russian poet sponsored by Opportunity Magazine (Arna Bontemps won in 1926 and 1927). I trace some of these influences to the racial politics of Byron’s “The Island” or the stanzas on political freedom in “The Giaour” and “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage”. Writers adopted Byron’s sartorial style, his witty repartee, and his dashing improvisational methods, especially Mickiewicz, who translated “The Giaour” and “Darkness” (Ciemność ), and Pushkin, who was fascinated by Byron’s sacrifice in Greece. I studied Polish for three years, rather unsuccessfully I might add, to help the book along. I was amazed and humbled by the standard of scholarship on Pushkin and Mickiewicz (A Different Mickiewicz by Michal Kuziak [2022] comes to mind), and the work of such critics as Mirosława Mozdrewska(especially Poland’s Angry Romantic [2009], which she edited with Peter Cochran and Bill Johnston). Prof. Mozdrewska has written about Byron’s influence on the Solidarity movement in Poland, especially Adam Mickiewicz’s translated lines from Byron which were pinned to a monument in the Gdansk shipyards; she arranged a spectacular conference in Gdansk that inspired me to study Polish. Maria Janion’s important work underpins many of the arguments I make in the second half of the volume.
4) What were your most surprising discoveries while researching and writing this book?
I was surprised to learn that Adam Mickiewicz’s Konrad Wallenrod had its premiere in St. Petersburg; his future mother-in-law Maria Szymanowska provided musical settings, some of which were sung by his future wife and Maria’s daughter, Celina. Music and politics intertwine. I was surprised by the friendship between Frédéric Chopin and Mickiewicz during their Parisian exile; the origins of Pan Tadeusz, written in Paris, and its debt to Byron’s Don Juan; the relationship between Pushkin’s “Poltava” and Byron’s “Mazeppa”, and what that has to teach us about the current situation in Ukraine; and the links between “Eugene Onegin” and Don Juan, rarely discussed in British books on Byron. The Chopin/Mickiewicz/George Sand circle was also fun to explore, as were Mickiewicz’s mysticism, Towianism and Frankism, and his death while raising a Jewish battalion during the Crimean War. I think George Sand’s reading of Mickiewicz’s Forefathers’ Eve and its relationship to Byron’s Manfred is important to consider. Through a strange coincidence, I happened to visit Mickiewicz’s grave in Istanbul (thanks to Prof. Piya Pal Lapinski’s research) on the anniversary of his death, which inspired the second half of my book and my further focus on Adam Mickiewicz’s writings. I then visited archives in Warsaw, Paris, and Lithuania, struck by Mickiewicz’s expulsion from college because of the Philomath society (1817), his arrest, and the documentation of that in Forefathers’ Eve. Finally, I was amazed at Mickiewicz’s range of reference: his friendship with Margaret Fuller, editor of The Dial, who met Mickiewicz in 1847, and his references to Ralph Waldo Emerson and James Fenimore Cooper’s The Spy, as well as his famous, ground-breaking lectures at the Sorbonne on Slavic studies. Of course, Polish schoolchildren and scholars such as Warclaw Lednicki and Czesław Miłosz (The Land of Ulro) have known about him for a long time! I had much catching up to do.
5) What new projects are you currently working on?
I am working on a project on women, hip hop and their relationship to Mexican muralism, especially as manifested in Los Angeles by the work of Judy Baca, Barbara Carrasco, and film-maker Agnes Varda (Mur Murs). As a New Yorker, I was influenced by the graffiti movement of the 1980s; this project traces democracy on the walls to Chicana muralists, and draws on my previous book, Words of the Prophets (Brill, 2023). Words of the Prophets includes a discussion of Byron’s inscriptions at the Temple of Poseidon at Sounion, and Blake’s fascination with “America”, a topic treated by José Clemente Orozco’s “The Epic of American Civilization”.
Amy WilcocksonComments Off on Bodleian Visiting Fellowships in Special Collections – applications open, deadline 27 November 2026
The Bodleian Libraries are now accepting applications for the Carr-Thomas-Ovenden Visiting Fellowship in English Literature to be taken up during academic year 2027-28. Bodleian Visiting Fellowships support periods of research in the Special Collections of the Bodleian Libraries, Oxford.
