Many thanks to Sharon Choe for her excellent report on the BARS Conference 2024!
This year’s biennial BARS conference was held at the beautiful University of Glasgow. With the theme of ‘Making and Unmaking,’ the conference promised to be a collection of interesting and insightful approaches to the topic within various fields. And indeed, it was a rich conference with so many interesting papers that it proved difficult to select panels to attend. The opening plenary by Michelle Levy set the tone for the week, with a thought-provoking readdressing of the relationship between women writers and the making of the printed book. Levy proposed that it is important to complicate the role of publishers when addressing the printed book, since they were not just money-driven, market-based entities, but they had opinions and influence, thus allowing women writers agency and opportunities to collaborate.
As a scholar with connections to Blake Studies, I attended as many Blake papers as possible throughout the week (a more in-depth review of them can be found via the Global Blake Network). What stood out to me here was how this theme allowed for a beautiful crossover between the art and text of Blake that is a huge part of the field, but rarely discussed in such fullness as demonstrated at BARS 2025. From Hannah McAuliffe’s paper on the making/unmaking of the individual plates of the illuminated books on the first day, to Tara Lee’s talk on epigenesis and preformation in Blake on the last day, there was a fantastic range of scholarship from early careers and PhDs in the field.
A fantastic panel on Wednesday was ‘Bardic Liberties,’ where the idea of ‘Making and Unmaking’ were explored through the lens of abolitionist narratives, poetry, and perspectives. Rhys Kaminski Jones examined Iolo Morganwg, the ‘bard of liberty,’ and the discourse of bardic freedom, suggesting that Iolo does not equate Wales with Africa in his poetry, but rather presents a sympathetic observer and voice. Kaminski Jones proposed that Iolo reveals an anxious commitment to bardic purity, since commerce and ethics blend within the bardic to reveal a complex relationship between liberation and overarching economic structures at play. Julia Carlson then spoke on Thomas Clarkson’s 1808 riverine map that presents a timeline of abolition. Carlson rethinks the idea of remaking time and idea of history through these fold-out time charter maps that accompany larger volumes of historical accounts. Although these maps were usually sold separately, by including his own within his History of the Abolition of the Slave Trade, Clarkson invests in a material expression of abolitionist commitment. The unfolding plates implicate readers in the active participation of abolition, while the figurative language of rivers connects Clarkson’s audience more intimately to the continent of Africa.
To finish the panel, Chris Townsend posed an ethical conundrum: what is at stake when thinking about or reading abolitionist poetry? He argued that the commodification of the poetic form capitalized on the slave trade, and so what was produced during the period could look a lot like virtue signaling and an opportunistic, capitalist venture. Townsend’s discussion spoke to what Kaminiski Jones was suggesting with Iolo, that the capitalist gain of selling abolitionist poetry and narratives makes it harder to know where to draw the line within artistic or textual representation. The paper also touched upon Clarkson, before suggesting that market economics determines slavery, and therefore there is a false dichotomy between humanitarianism and capitalism. Is de-colonization a literal transaction? Townsend asked, and the panel concluded with a thoughtful philosophical introspection: since reputation equals profit, as scholars interested in abolitionism with REFs to consider and publications to produce, we too must think about our own reputation and what we gain by studying such texts.
Sharon Choe is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Copenhagen. She holds a PhD from the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies at the University of York (2022), and her thesis examined how the artist-poet William Blake used Old Norse culture to create a disabled body politic in his poetry.
Sharon’s current EU-funded project, DEATHRIT, examines representations of Norse “Viking” death and ritual in eighteenth-century British literature, suggesting that Anglo-Nordic cross-cultural exchange was vital to British nation formation during the period. Her research also includes developing a new theoretical approach to the body politic metaphor. This builds on her prior work in Disability Studies to consider death and ritual within visions of nation-building.