BARS Blog

An International Conference | Kobe City University of Foreign Studies, Japan | 17–19 July 2027

We are pleased to announce an international conference on ‘Romanticism and the Sense of Place’, to be held at Kobe City University of Foreign Studies, Japan in July 2027. 

The conference invites papers exploring the diverse relationships between Romanticism and place in Britain, Europe, North America, Asia and beyond. We understand ‘sense of place’ broadly, encompassing not only attachment and belonging but also travel, displacement, memory, loss, contestation, and the making and unmaking of place.

We welcome papers on individual writers and works, as well as comparative, interdisciplinary, transnational and global approaches. Topics might include, but are not limited to:

• Romanticism, landscapes and the sense of place
• Locality, regional identity and rural communities
• Mobility, wandering, travel, tourism and the discovery or invention of place
• Cities, urbanisation and metropolitan spaces
• Enclosure, land ownership and displacement
• Nature, ecology and environmental change
• Exile, place, memory and nostalgia
• Home, dwelling and domestic experiences of place
• Geographies of belonging and exclusion
• Empire, colonialism, settlement and the making and unmaking of place
• Revisiting Orientalism and Romantic geographies of cultural encounter
• Nation, nationalism, borders and contested territories
• Maps, cartography, topography and geographical knowledge in the Romantic era

We particularly welcome papers on the movement, reception and transformation of Romantic ideas across cultures, and also on the ways in which Romanticism may look different when viewed from beyond its European contexts.

Plenary speakers include:

Tara Lee (University of Hong Kong)

Chris Murray (Monash University)
Nahoko Miyamoto Alvey (University of Tokyo)
John Strachan (Bath Spa University)

Convenors:
Kaz Oishi (University of Tokyo)
Saeko Yoshikawa (Kobe City University of Foreign Studies)
Jane Moore (Cardiff University)

with John Strachan (Bath Spa University)

Please also see the attached poster regarding the event.

Please submit a 300-word proposal to romanticregenerations@gmail.com by 28 February 2027.

For further information and queries, please contact romanticregenerations@gmail.com

———

Kaz Oishi and John Strachan

Editor: Dewey W. Hall

Volcanic Materiality: Phenomena in the Age of the Anthropocene asserts that volcanic eruptions during the long nineteenth century contributed to the rise of the Anthropocene, which has been viewed as human impact on the climate and environment since James Watts’s reinvention of the steam engine in 1784. Whereas in the past geologic epoch, the Holocene, the Earth evolved and changed over deep time, unprecedented changes have occurred in the past 240 years inducing a global, existential crisis as a direct result from human intervention due in part to capitalist industrialism, which has disrupted the climate and environment. Volcanic Materiality: Phenomena in the Age of the Anthropocene stakes out the claim that volcanic eruptions in their fiery reality with a Volcanic Explosivity Index (VEI) of 4 or greater created shocks to the system that exacerbated the growing threat of carbon emissions. Subsequently, with implications for the 21^st century, the edition considers these two major questions: 1) How have volcanoes and humanity contributed to the rise of the Anthropocene due to volcanic and anthropogenic activity? 2) What sort of evidence appears in literary and visual representations during the long nineteenth century?

Volcanic matter really matters. During a one hundred year span from the 1780s to 1880s, a series of volcanic eruptions occurred that altered the atmosphere, disrupted weather conditions, and caused unprecedented loss due to famine and widespread disease: Laki, Iceland (1783-1784); Vesuvius, Italy (1794); Pico Viejo, Canary Islands (1798); Tambora, Indonesia (1815); Ferdinandea, Sicily (1831); Hekla, Iceland (1840, 1845); and Krakatoa, Indonesia (1883). Various critics have written about the systemic effects geologically, meteorologically, and ecologically such as Richard Altick, David Higgins, Monique Morgan, Marilynn Olsen, Nicholas Robbins, Jesse Oak Taylor, and Gillen D’Arcy Wood.

A variety of writers and artists documented the effects due, in part to a great extent, to the eruptions, which may include the sky watchers identified, but are not limited to the following. 

In literary studies, one might think of literary and non-literary records: 

*Gilbert White’s Natural History of Selborne (1789) in response to the effects of the Laki eruption

*William Wordsworth’s Lucy poems written in Goslar, Germany (e.g., “Strange fits of passion” and “A slumber did my spirit seal”) influenced by the Pico Viejo eruption

*George Gordon, Lord Byron’s “Darkness” (1816) and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or the Modern Prometheus (1818) in response to the Tambora eruption

*Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “Remarkable Sunsets” in Nature (1883) and John Ruskin’s “The ‘Storm-Cloud’ of the Nineteenth Century” (1884) shaped by the Krakatoa eruption

In visual art, a host of artists captured the dramatic stratovolcanic eruptions and the sky altering effects:

*Joseph Wright of Derby’s Vesuvius from Portici (1774-1776)

*J.M.W. Turner’s Eruption of Soufriere Mountain (1812)

*J.M.W. Turner’s Vesuvius in Eruption (1817)

*Caspar David Friedrich’s Woman before the Rising or Setting Sun (1818-1824)

*Georges Seurat’s Bathers at Asnieres (1884)

*William Ascroft’s Twilight and afterglow effects at Chelsea (1888)

Scholars interested in submitting to the call for contributions to the edited collection Volcanic Materiality in Literature and Art of the Anthropocene, under contract with Edinburgh University Press, will be asked to include a 200-300 word abstract along with a 100 word biography sent to Dewey W. Hall, Ph.D. at dwhall@cpp.edu. The deadline will be November 30, 2026. Full drafts will be due February 28, 2027. ——-

Dewey W. Hall