Today, short form video is one of the best ways to reach a wide, public audience. To broaden the scope of Romantic studies and encourage engagement from non-academic individuals, the BARS Communications Team are looking for people with a background in Romanticism to contribute to the ‘Romantic Reimaginings’ Short Form Video Project.
The aim of this project is to create content aimed to engage people who have an interest in Romantic literature, history, and culture, but who might not have access to libraries or resources to help them take that interest further. We want to design content that is accessible enough to appeal to people with no previous understanding of Romanticism by relating Romantic themes, topics, and ideas to contemporary literature, art, film, and media. To do this, we’re developing a series of short form videos (60 seconds or less), written and presented by people with a background in Romantic studies, to post as Tik Tok videos and YouTube shorts on the BARS channels.
Information for contributors:
Contributors will write a script and film themselves presenting it – we’ll offer guidance on both aspects of production. They will then send the video to us and we’ll make any small edits before uploading to TikTok and YouTube.
This project is a great way to practice disseminating your work to a non-specialist audience, and what you choose to present doesn’t have to be original or ground-breaking. Distilling key ideas, writers, concepts, and texts into very accessible short form content is the goal – whether it’s a quick analysis of a line from a poem, or the speedy retelling of a well-known Romantic anecdote.
Where applicable, videos will be linked to the ‘Romantic Reimaginings’ blog post series. They will function as a precis to the individual blog posts available on the BARS website, and will link Romantic tropes to modern trivia, film, art, and literature. How is Taylor Swift’s Folklore a Romantic reimagining? What would Mary Wollstonecraft think of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie?
We’re not proposing this as an alternative to more traditional methods of engaging with an audience or readership; rather we hope it will introduce people to Romantic studies in an easy and informal way and direct them to other resources they might enjoy.
We welcome expressions of interest from anyone with a background in Romantic studies, from students to professors – so if you’d like to get involved, please get in touch! Send an email to BARS at britishassociationromantic@gmail.com or feel free to message us via social media.
Thank you for your interest!
Check out the BARS TikTok page for examples of the kind of content we’re planning to create – however we’re very happy for you to experiment and take an alternative approach to creating content!