Dear colleagues,
We are pleased to announce the Second Poznań European Romanticism Conference, to be held in Poznań, Poland, from 1–3 June 2027.
ROMANTIC INTERRUPTIONS, ROMANTIC DISRUPTIONS
The conference is organised by Adam Mickiewicz University Poznań, Faculty of Polish and Classical Philology; Bath Spa University, School of Creative and Cultural Arts; and the Inter-University Centre for the Study of Romanticism.
The Poznań European Romanticism Conference 2027 invites papers exploring interruption, disruption, delay, incompletion, and long-duration composition in British, European, and Irish Romantic writing and scholarship. The conference asks how political upheaval, censorship, exile, economic pressures and personal circumstance shaped the creation of literary and intellectual works across Romantic Europe.
Our starting point is François-René de Chateaubriand’s Memoirs from Beyond the Tomb, a work that accompanied its author for some forty years. In 1821, while undertaking an official diplomatic mission in Berlin, Chateaubriand resumed work on the Memoirs, reflecting on the repeated interruptions and abandonments that had marked its composition.
We propose to take Chateaubriand’s remarkable work as a pretext for exploring the nature of the creative process within European Romanticism. How were literary and intellectual works actually composed? How did interruption, delay and abandonment become part of the creative process? And how were writing practices shaped by political circumstances, the circulation of ideas and transnational literary exchange?
Recent research on eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century European literature and intellectual history has increasingly emphasised the precarious conditions in which writers worked. Martin Mulsow’s concept of ‘precarious knowledge’, for example, draws attention to the vulnerability of writers whose work could expose them to persecution, censorship, imprisonment, confiscation, destruction or posthumous disgrace. Such conditions were particularly significant for Polish writers working under conditions of statelessness, but they also invite wider comparative consideration of Romantic literary and scholarly production.
We particularly welcome papers addressing:
- Literary or scholarly works that were interrupted during their creation, including literature, essays and literary criticism;
- Works consisting of multiple parts, composed over an extended period;
- Works planned or developed over many years, including diaries, memoirs and travelogues;
- Works abandoned during their creation;
- Works completed but not published because of publishing, economic or political circumstances.
Confirmed Plenary Speakers
Dr Madeleine Callaghan (University of Sheffield)
Professor Claire Connolly (University of Cork)
Professor Michał Kuziak (University of Warsaw)
Biennial Workshop on Academic Publishing
Professor Lucy Morrison, Co-Editor, European Romantic Review (University of Nebraska at Omaha)
The conference will be held in English.
Please submit a paper proposal, including an abstract of no more than 300 words, together with a short biographical note, to junkiert@amu.edu.pl by 31 October 2026.
Notification of acceptance will be sent by the end of November 2026.
A modest conference fee is planned; the exact amount will be determined once the list of participants has been finalised.
We warmly invite colleagues working on British, Irish, Polish and European Romanticism to join us in Poznań for what we hope will be a stimulating comparative and transnational discussion of Romantic writing, its conditions of production, and its many interruptions and afterlives.
Hosts
Prof Maciej Junkiert (Poznań)
Prof Diego Saglia (Parma)
Prof John Strachan (Bath)
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John Strachan