Past President’s Report 2024
Anthony Mandal (Cardiff University, UK)
During my term as BARS President between 2019 and 2024, our community has experienced massive changes. Between 2020 and 2022, the world succumbed to a devastating global event, with the COVID-19 pandemic ravaging communities and irrevocably disrupting our lifestyles and working habits. The pandemic was accompanied by other transformative events. The final separation instituted by the 2016 Brexit Referendum came into effect on 31 January 2020. The callous murder of George Floyd in May 2020 led to global protests at racial injustice and institutional prejudice, leading many organisations including BARS to reflect on how to translate revulsion into practical action. Alongside these, the intensification of conflicts has brought global disruption and the tragic loss of human lives at a massive scale, first between Russia and Ukraine in early 2022 and then between Gaza and Israel late in 2023. Months of war have continued, and I would like to take this opportunity to join the call for a ceasefire and the restoration of human life and dignity in both theatres of conflict.
Amidst this turmoil, the BARS Executive has sought to face these challenges by being responsive to the needs of our community. Indeed, it has been heartening to see something of ‘a return to normal’ in the eighteen months or so that have closed out my term as President, which itself had been extended by a year owing to the pandemic. Membership numbers have remained buoyant and are currently sitting at just over the 500 mark. Our funds also are strong: during the pandemic years, we amassed quite a ‘war chest’, with plenty of reserves for future activities. Since then, and as outlined below, we have widened and diversified our expenditure in supporting BARS members’ activities, which is eating away healthily at our surpluses. As we move forward to the next phase of BARS activities, we will need to balance our income generation with our expenditure to ensure best value for money, alongside maintaining as many of our existing initiatives and developing more.
While we may have faced challenging times, BARS has remained an active community, both online and in person. I am grateful to my fellow members of the Executive – past and present – who have devoted their energies to numerous initiatives with generosity and passion. We produced a series of digital resources for scholars in response to the pandemic and in the wake of the Black Lives Matter crisis, which can still be accessed on the BARS Blog. Alongside these specific measures, BARS has sought to continue its regular business as much as possible. The BARS Review has published issues regularly, notwithstanding the logistical challenges of passing copies of books between publishers and reviewers. The BARS Blog has been phenomenally active in sharing details about all thing Romanticism related, as well as keeping conversation going through series such as ‘Five Questions’, ‘On This Day’ and more recently ‘The BARS Examiner’. We have continued to run our BARS First Book Prize, with the last two being chaired by Francesca Saggini (2021 Prize) and Simon Kövesi (2023 Prize), and I’d like to reiterate thanks to the 2021 and 2023 panels, as well as extend my congratulations to this year’s winner, Stephanie O’Rourke, for her book Art, Science, and the Body in Early Romanticism (2021).
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One of the key successes in our response to the pandemic has been our Digital Events Series, which launched in November 2020. This series, for which we’ve run nearly thirty events, will shortly be entering its fifth season this autumn. Visitors can also catch up on the back catalogue on the BARS Digital Events YouTube channel. Our forays into the digital world have been expanded by the recent launch of our TikTok channel, which complements the longform YouTube recordings with short content that focus on a single issue, author or locaiton.
The experience of running the Digital Events fed itself into our first online conference, Romantic Disconnections/Reconnections (2021), which sought to respond directly to the challenges raised for our community by COVID-19. This event spanned six days and allowed us to engage with Romanticists from around the world. It also built in no small measure upon our very early experience of running an online conference in the pandemic, when we had to take the swift decision to move our Postgraduate and Early Career conference, appropriately titled Romantic Futurities, to an online format; this ran in June 2020.
Our next attempt at merging the in-person with the digital was the phenomenal New Romanticisms conference run by Andy McInnes (now our Secretary) at Edge Hill University two years ago, and organised jointly with the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism (NASSR). This conference was truly hybrid, in that Andy – much to his credit – oversaw the simultaneous organisation of New Romanticisms live both online and in person throughout its four days. In attempting to address our local and global audiences, this meant meeting the challenge of overseeing digitally focused and on-campus activities for hundreds of delegates. We also trialled a slightly changed running schedule in an attempt to make the conference more accessible, by moving it away from its traditional weekend conclusion into an in-week event that began on a Tuesday and concluded on a Friday.
Our next PGR/ECR conference, Romantic Boundaries, was again able to draw together on our experiences in the post-pandemic era in June 2023, with a full return to campus – this time at the University of Edinburgh. These trials and successes germinated into the structure for our most recent conference, also held in Scotland: BARS 2024, Romantic Making and Unmaking. The theme of Making and Unmaking in many ways continues a thread of conference themes that have focused on intertwined issues: Boundaries in 2023; New Romanticisms 2022; Disconnections/Reconnections 2021; Futurities 2020; and Facts and Fantasies 2019. Based on our experiences and the time available, the BARS Executive agreed to deliver a model of on-campus events followed closely by an online event, overseen by two different teams. The Glasgow event was a tremendous one! We had around 250 delegates in attendance and numerous panels, plenaries, roundtables and special events. This was ably complemented by two days of online conference that followed a week later, which fielded around sixty papers from scholars from across the world.
I’d like to reiterate my thanks to the organising teams of the on-campus and online events. For the on-campus conference, Matt Sangster and the team at Glasgow, especially Cleo O’Callaghan Yeoman and Will Sherwood, and the University of Glasgow’s School of Critical Studies Operations Team, particularly Katrina McNeil, Marie Meechan and Tim Perry, for their support with the Eventbrite. For the online conference, Andy McInnes, Isabelle Murray, Francesca Saggini, Cassie Ulph, Rosie Whitcombe and especially Amy Wilcockson. Of course, a conference wouldn’t be anything without its presenters, so I would like to extend my thanks to our 300+ plenaries, speakers, roundtable contributors and chairs.
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This year, we have seen the reinstatement of our popular Chawton Fellowships – we are currently offering two awards per year, with one of these open to ECRs and the other open to all members. The Chawton Fellowships joins other regular long-standing schemes such as our Stephen Copley Research Awards, Wordsworth Trust Early Career Fellowships and the Nineteenth-Century Matters Early Career Fellowship (jointly supported by the British Association for Victorian Studies). We also have our President’s Fellowship aimed at researchers from a minority ethnic background and about to enter its third year, and our Open Fellowship, which supports innovative work of any kind in Romantic studies. I would like to extend my congratulations to the various award holders in each of these schemes, whose rich and diverse interest keeps our research at the forefront of the field.
During the past five years, the Executive have sought to build and improve on our principles and practices, in order to make them more transparent and accountable, while promoting the inclusivity, accessibility and diversity at the heart of our practices. We have established protocols for the reviewing and reporting of any of our competitions for bursaries and awards. In particular, we have sought to make standing for the BARS Executive a more open process, making use of online tools to platform and allow the membership to vote for candidates.
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I can’t say that the past five years as President of BARS has been without its challenges – little did I know when I stood on the stage for the first time after my election in Nottingham back in the summer of 2019 what would be coming up just half a year later. That said, it has been my honour and my pleasure to serve BARS during these challenging years. I have said ‘We’ rather than ‘I’ in these reflections because BARS has been very much a team, indeed a family, with whom I’ve been honoured and humbled to have worked with such a wonderful and generous group of people.
I would like to extend my thanks to past and outgoing members of the Executive for their contributions: Ian Haywood, Gillian Dow, Tess Somervell, Anna Mercer, Daniel Cook, Paul Stephens, Colette Davies, Cassie Ulph, Mark Sandy, Amanda Blake Davis, Yu-Hung Tien and David Fallon.
I’d also like to share best wishes and thanks to the current Executive: Jennie Orr, Andy McInnes, Mary Fairclough, Yimon Lo, Amy Wilcockson, Gerard Lee McKeever, Jason Whittaker, Caroline Anjali Ritchie, Cleo O’Callaghan Yeoman, Zooey Ziller, Kate Nankervis, Charlotte May, Jeff Cowton, Emily Paterson-Morgan, Francesca Saggini and Carmen Casaliggi.
Thanks also go to our various Digital Fellows and Communications Assistants of the past few years: Jack Orchard, Francesca Killoran, Isabelle Murray, Rosie Whitcombe and Adam Neikirk.
A special huge mention goes to Matthew Sangster, our President as of 2024. Many of you already know Matt, which is unsurprising given his unceasing commitment to our Association. For many years, he has taken on a range of roles beyond his previous one as Website Officer, often mentoring and supporting, as well as leading other members of the Executive in uncounted ways. I can think of no better person to whom I could pass on the mantle of President in these coming years. With the support of an amazing Executive, I’m certain BARS will move on to greater heights as we enter the second half of the 2020s, and I’m grateful we’ll have Matt’s wisdom and passion leading the way in this. Many congratulations!
Warmest regards,
