Adam NeikirkComments Off on Romantic Poets in the Wild #11: Dilara Kalkan
Romantic Poets is back and this time, I’m coming to you from the Lake District! Currently I am staying in a cottage in Ambleside as part of my Early Career Fellowship with Wordsworth Grasmere. Couldn’t be more RPW than that!
This week we are featuring two poems by Dilara Kalkan. Dilara is currently pursuing her Master’s degree in English Language and Literature at Atatürk University, where she is in the early stages of her thesis. Her research is centered on the legacy of Romanticism in contemporary literature, with an emphasis on the work of the second-generation Romantics.
She has a special admiration for Mary Shelley, whose influence she explores both academically and creatively. Dilara curates the Instagram page @odetoshelley, a personal project dedicated to Shelley’s life and legacy, where she shares reflections, archival findings, and connections between Romanticism and the modern world.
Dilara has published one paper and completed her undergraduate studies with honors. She is grateful for the opportunities to share her work, including an upcoming presentation at the Feminist Enlightenment Politics / Feministische Aufklärung und Politik conference, and a roundtable she will be hosting on Villa Diodati for the BARS Digital Events series in Autumn 2025.
She is deeply interested in languages, literature, and cultures, and enjoys learning from different perspectives through travel and study. Writing in English as a second language, Dilara finds creative energy in exploring themes such as identity, memory, and storytelling through a Romantic lens.
Dilara Kalkan in a decidedly civilized space
Ode to Shelley: Written in the quiet shadow of my own struggles, this poem is both a whisper of gratitude and a vow of remembrance. Mary Shelley’s courage, her ability to write through ruin, to speak through sorrow became a lantern in my darkest days. In turning to her, I found not only words but a way forward. This ode is my offering to the one who taught me that grief, when held in ink, can become something enduring.
ODE TO SHELLEY
Opened her eyes unto a great Loss,
A strong little Girl she had to emboss,
Bloomed in the Dark and the Light;
She gave her words Life.
O' Mary! The Fairy! This world is so Dreary!
Yet thy pen and bravery light up this path of uncertainty!
Child of two unique parents,
Not a society-pleaser, instead hers is a voice that transcends,
Found her strength at the tip of the pen,
Taught the world at eighteen, Frankenstein's end.
O' Mary! The Fairy! The wind doth carry
My sorrows away, whilst leading me to the day I hope to call happy!
Bringing back the dead ones,
Only possible through writing lines,
I aim to hail the soul of Thee
Whilst hoping the world shall see.
O' Mary! The Fairy! Writing is my clarity!
For this, I owe thee much, for the inspiration
thou hast brought!
Ode to the Nameless Creature: For over two centuries, readers have asked: who is the real monster: Frankenstein or the being he made? But perhaps the question is not who, but where. Perhaps the creature sleeps within us all, buried beneath civility, unreachable yet never truly gone. This ode is addressed to that forgotten voice; the one we deny, the one we fear, the one that, like Mary Shelley’s creation, only ever wanted to be seen.
ODE TO THE NAMELESS CREATURE
Oh, the Nameless Creature!
Where have you gone? Or are you here?
Do you feel alone too?
Like I am so used to.
It's not the looks that make one a Monster
But, still I need an answer!
Why couldn't you listen to your gentle side?
Was it too concealed, a secret to hide?
We all have Monsters in us, they say
If one makes it apparent, will the others stay?
Alas! Life is not a game to play!
It's getting too dark, please led me the way.
Oh, the Nameless Creature!
Is that your shadow that I see?
You don't turn back no matter how hard I scream
Maybe after all, this was a bad dream...
We thank Dilara for sharing her work with BARS and would like to remind you, the reader, to reach out to the BARS Comms Team if you have anything you’d like to submit to our blog (including your poems, other creative/critical writing, and art)! I’m off to explore Grasmere Waterfall Walkways…
Adam NeikirkComments Off on Call for Papers: Romantic Circulations
Nordic Association of Romantic Studies (NARS) Conference
University of Oslo: 10-12 September 2026
Call for Papers: Romantic Circulations
This three-day conference at the University of Oslo invites scholars engaged in the study of romanticism writ large from the expanded Nordic region to present new research on the circulation of romantic ideas and objects. The topic «Romantic Circulations» encompasses both romantic discourses that arose in the period most typically associated with romanticism, but also the afterlives of romantic ideas, people, objects, discourses, etc. Focusing on processes like dissemination, circulation, and transference, we aim to challenge traditional understandings of the relationship between center and periphery in the spread of romantic discourses and aesthetics.
We also posit that the recent turn toward transnational and transdisciplinary aspects of romanticism in scholarship demands a reassessment of approaches, methodologies, and historiographic structures of the field. We therefore encourage meta-theoretical perspectives, as well as meta-critical reevaluations of entrenched narratives about romantic phenomena. We also welcome cultural interventions from various perspectives, including indigenous, environmental, postcolonial, gender, and other marginalized groups.
With this conference, we aim to expand our understanding of romanticism and explore together how it manifests and adapts in different times, place, and artistic forms. We encourage contributions from a broad range of fields, including art history and visual culture, literary studies, musicology, history of ideas, philosophy, cultural studies and museology, and history.
Confirmed keynotes:
Timothy R. Tangherlini (UC Berkeley)
Stephanie O’Rourke (University of St.Andrews)
We welcome individual proposals as well as pre-constituted panels.
Early Career Scholars are particularly encouraged to apply.
Please send an abstract of max 500 words and a short biography of 200 words by 1. October 2025 to romanticcirculations@gmail.com
Note of acceptance by 1 February 2026
Organized by Ellen Rees (University of Oslo and) and Tonje Haugland Sørensen (NARS Executive Committee), and co-funded by the ERC project NORN.
Amy WilcocksonComments Off on Notice: Wordsworth’s Home at Rydal Mount Campaign
BARS has been requested to circulate this letter from Charlotte Wontner on the campaign to maintain Rydal Mount as a public museum.
Dear All,
I am writing with some urgency as I am trying to save Wordsworth’s historic home Rydal Mount (1813 until his death in 1850)https://www.rydalmount.co.uk/. Currently open to the public, the house is now at risk of being sold into private ownership as it has been put up for sale this month. As one of the most important sites in the UK’s literary landscape, its house and gardens have inspired generations of poets, writers, environmentalists and lovers of the arts. Losing it as a public monument to Wordsworth would be an irreplaceable tragedy.
As a direct descendent of the great poet, I am launching a campaign to acquire the property and place it in trust, ensuring it remains open to the public as a centre for poetry, literature, and artistic inspiration.
We would greatly value your thoughts on potential supporters who might help bring this plan to fruition. While lovers of poetry and literature are natural allies, we also hope to engage with artists, actors, writers, broadcasters, academics, garden enthusiasts, environmentalists, and (it goes without saying) possible financial patrons. Additionally, we hope that educational institutions might be interested in endowing a poet, writer, artist-in-residence or gardener-in-residence programme or acquiring the house to preserve its cultural legacy.
Dating back to the 16th century, Rydal Mount has been open to the public all year round since 1970, when it was acquired by my grandmother and filled with a unique collection of Wordsworth artefacts. We very much hope to keep this collection in the house for the education and enjoyment of future generations. Rydal Mount is the most beautiful, tranquil and magical place where one’s imagination and creativity can run free. So many visitors return again and again as it is such a wonderful escape from the modern world, a place to reflect on Wordsworth’s art and values, and to fuel the creative imaginations of future generations. We really want to keep the Rydal Mount story alive and know that we can do this with a community of like-minded people.
Your support in any form would not only help to secure this cultural treasure for the future but also reaffirm the importance of preserving spaces that nurture creativity and artistic heritage. If you are open to a conversation, I would love to discuss how you might like to be involved in this endeavour.
Here is the website link; https://saverydalmount.org.uk/. If you feel you would like to subscribe and share I would be very grateful.
Thank you for your time and consideration. I deeply appreciate any support you may be able to offer in safeguarding this extraordinary piece of literary history.
Amy WilcocksonComments Off on Registration Open: Anna Letitia Barbauld: Voicing Dissent conference
Anna Letitia Barbauld: Voicing Dissent conference
University of York, 27-28 June 2025.
REGISTRATION OPEN!
Registration is now open for our conference, Anna Letitia Barbauld: Voicing Dissent, to be held at King’s Manor, University of York, and online on 27-28 June 2025. You are all warmly invited to attend. Please register at our conference webpage: tinyurl.com/barbauld25
Anna Letitia Barbauld (1743-1825) was a poet, educator and polemicist, celebrated after her death as ‘unquestionably the first of our female poets, and one of the most eloquent and powerful of our prose writers’. The year 2025 marks the two-hundredth anniversary of Barbauld’s death and the publication of a new four-volume scholarly edition of her Collected Works by Oxford University Press. We celebrate these landmarks with a two-day conference in-person at the King’s Manor, University of York, and online, organised by the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies in collaboration with the Department of English and Related Literature.
Our keynote speakers William McCarthy, Elizabeth Kraft, Scott Krawczuk and Emma Clery will discuss editing Barbauld’s work, will investigate the importance of dissenting thought and feeling for her poetry and prose, and will explore the legacy of her work in much more recent voicings of religious and political dissent.
We focus in this conference on the ‘voices’ of dissent in Barbauld’s work. She was acutely attuned to the rhetorical force of the human voice, working in forms and genres designed for vocalisation, from songs and hymns to speeches and sermons.
Barbauld produced powerfully creative responses to dissenting traditions, and inspired strong legacies of creative and polemical expression in her own lifetime and since.
We warmly welcome both in-person and online registrations. Register at the conference webpage here, and check the webpage for our full two-day conference programme.
We gratefully acknowledge the support of the MHRA, Dr Williams Trust, British Association of Romantic Studies, British Association of Victorian Studies, and York Georgian Society.
On Tuesday 3rd June Royal Holloway, University of London, in collaboration with the British Association of Victorian Studies and the British Association of Romantic Studies, will host an in-person colloquium examining realisms across literary, artistic, theatrical, and critical forms, and considering the continuing influence of nineteenth-century thought on our current moment.
There are no registration fees and we particularly welcome scholars with an interest in the nineteenth century, postgraduates, and early-career researchers. A light lunch and refreshments will be provided and there will be opportunities for in-person networking and research sharing throughout the day.
In the morning and early afternoon, delegates will present 15-minute papers attending to nineteenth-century realisms (broadly conceived). These diverse and interdisciplinary discussions will lay the foundation for an interactive roundtable event during the afternoon structured around the topic “Managing Difficult Legacies”. We will reflect upon how nineteenth-century ideas, understandings, and problems raised during the paper presentations continue to influence university courses, institutions in the GLAM sector, as well as contemporary cultural and political discourses.
1) How did you first become interested in Shelley and his works?
Though I must have read some Shelley as an undergraduate, I didn’t really focus much on Romantic or nineteenth-century writing then, so I guess my first real engagement with Shelley came about 20 years ago, when I got interested in Romantic conceptions of ‘life’. I have a vivid memory of reading ‘Ode to the West Wind’ in my copy of the old Norton edition of Shelley’s works and being blown away by it (excuse the pun). And pretty quickly the rest of Shelley’s poetry – perhaps especially the longer poems such as Prometheus Unbound, The Witch of Atlas, and, of course, The Triumph of Life – became central to how I set about approaching this interest in ‘life’, as did, of course, Shelley’s fragmentary essay ‘On Life’. All of this coalesced into my book Shelley and the Apprehension of Life (Cambridge University Press, 2013), which was originally conceived as a project on Romanticism and the idea of ‘immortal verse’ quite generally. I’m glad I wrote the Shelley book instead for a number of reasons, not least among them the fact that I spent a lot of time with this fascinating, sometimes frustrating figure, whose interests, passions, and commitments remain, for me, so compelling.
2) How did you decide on the structure for the collection? How much was determined by the format of the ‘Literature in Context’ series, and how much by Shelley’s specificities?
Quite a lot was determined by the ‘Literature in Context’ format and some of the recent precedents in that series. I looked closely, for instance, at Clara Tuite’s volume on Byron and my colleague Sarah Haggarty’s Blake collection. Bethany Thomas at CUP – a really supportive and engaged editor, by the way – also made it helpfully clear that the series is primarily intended for a readership more or less new to the authors dealt with in the individual volumes. That meant that each chapter needed to be fairly introductory and to focus on its author’s own view of a particular topic, text, or relationship, instead of being, say, an overview of the current state of the field or synthesis of other critical authorities. In writing my own chapter, I found that a bit tricky at times – we so often think and write in dialogue with other critics and commentators (which I think is a good thing) – though it could also be liberating, enabling a somewhat brisker, more decisive style of writing. But all of that said about the format of the series, there was also a good deal of latitude within those various constraints. It was up to me and, eventually, the contributors to determine how best to present Shelley’s life and times, what the most salient intellectual, cultural, and political contexts for thinking about his work are, how to organise consideration of that work itself, and how to frame his legacy. And there’s some real experimentation in the book with the form of the short chapters as well – have a look at Alex Freer’s chapter on lyric, for example, or Maureen McLane’s closing ‘palinode’ in response to Shelley’s work and its reception.
3) How did you go about assembling your roster of contributors?
This was one of the most fun parts of organising the volume – a bit like playing fantasy football league but with experts on Shelley instead of left-backs and centre-forwards. I began with a list of people whose work on Shelley I felt I’d learnt a lot from over the years or, especially in the case of younger colleagues, whose work I’d recently found suggestive and intriguing. But I always knew I needed a team to cover quite a lot of ground as well – some of it ground that was, I should confess, less well-known to me than it might have been. And then the readers for CUP were also very helpful, suggesting potential contributors for certain chapters and even a bit of rejigging of my suggested contributors so that they were assigned to other chapters than the ones I’d initially had in mind for them. I ended up with a team of 40 contributors from seven different countries. It’s fair to say that no-one could assume organising that number of people was going to be easy – but actually, thanks to the professionalism and kindness of all of the contributors, it was. Everything I received was more or less the right length straight away and pretty much on time – and of really high quality. I can honestly say it’d be a pleasure to work with every one of the contributors to the volume again.
4) Looking across the volume, what are the most exciting trends you’d pick out in current work on Shelley?
I think the first thing to say in response to this question is that I’ve learnt such a lot from editing this volume. I must have been approached by CUP to edit the volume because I’m supposed to be an expert on Shelley, but I quickly realised how much about his life and career I still had to learn, as well as how many ways there are and have been for thinking about his work. I’m a bit reluctant to pick out particular trends in work on Shelley on the basis of the volume because one of the things I really value about it is that it brings together a whole range of different kinds of work – really informative chapters on Shelley’s life, relationships, legacy, and reception; attempts to bring Shelley into dialogue with a range of often unexpected writers and artists; theoretically- and critically-informed discussions of his experiments in a wide array of poetic (and prose) genres. But if I have to, well, I was struck in particular by the breadth and variousness of what we might think of as Shelley’s posthumous career. This includes his reception by later poets and writers around the world (including some of the most innovative poets writing today), as well as in television, film, and music, but also the rather vexed history of the publication of his works – something, happily, we can now look back on with the completion of the Longman edition of his works and the steady progress of the Johns Hopkins edition as well.
5) What new projects are you currently working on?
I published a monograph in September 2023 – Critical Forms: Forms of Critical Writing, 1750–2020 (there isn’t much Shelley in it, I’m afraid, though there’s quite a bit of Keats, Wordsworth, and other Romantic writers) – and have, of course, just seen Percy Shelley in Context through the press, so I’m somewhat in the aftermath of a couple of big projects. I am working on a handful of essay-length things – a piece on Edgar Allan Poe I’ve given as a paper a few times, something on Walter Benjamin’s literary criticism for an edited collection – and have a couple of editorial projects of my own in the offing. Partly coming out of my project on the history of criticism, I’m getting interested in the relations between literature and liberalism – two terms, ominously, it seems very hard to define. I’m thinking about ‘literature’ as an institution, something with a certain measure of public and political investment, that might, historically, be associated with a broad political formation often categorised as ‘liberal’. Like the Critical Forms book, I see this as another transhistorical project – Lionel Trilling’s The Liberal Imagination is obviously going to be important to it, as is Amanda Anderson’s recent work – but one that will have a significant place for figures such as Shelley, Byron, Hazlitt, and Leigh Hunt, all of whom were involved, of course, in a short-lived endeavour called The Liberal.
Adam NeikirkComments Off on Romanticism Now: The Lesbian Sublime in Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019) and Ammonite (2020)
This week we have a new blog contribution from Eli S, discussing two films that feature the “lesbian sublime.” Eli S is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature in Germany.
THE LESBIAN SUBLIME in PORTRAIT OF A LADY ON FIRE (2019) and AMMONITE(2020)
by Eli S.
Introduction
A man is standing at the edge of a ragged cliff, staring at a mountainous scenery heavily covered by fog, seeking refuge in the remote edge of nature to nurture his imagination and promote his individuality. Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (Casper David Friedrich, 1817) is a signature image of the Romantic period to represent the masculine side of nature, calling it the sublime. Only, the masculine sublime found its meaning in a dichotomous relationship with the feminine beautiful.
Edmund Burke compared the sublime to the beautiful, calling the first an indicator of “pain and terror” (1844, 82) and the latter “smooth” (1844, 151) and “milder” (1844, 147). For Burke, the sublime “is associated with an experience of masculine empowerment; its contrasting term, the beautiful, is associated with an experience of feminine nurturance, love, and sensuous relaxation” (Mellor 1993, 85). Emanuel Kant also distinguished the sublime from the beautiful through its formless “limitlessness” (Kant 2007,75). In this equation, Romantic women authors domesticated the sublime in their gothic novels, relying upon the masculine terror and annihilation attached to it (Mellor 1993, 91). Mellor refers to the gothic novels of Ann Radcliffe in which “the deepest terror aroused by the masculine sublime originates in the exercise of patriarchal authority within home” and not in nature (Mellor 1993, 93). Gothic female authors subverted the masculine sublime by moving women from the domestic home and placing them in the wild to explore subversive desires. Gothic’s fertile ground for subversion and suppressed emotions makes it a convenient genre to express non-normative sexualities. “Gothic narrative often includes in its cast of characters representatives of the monstrous and the abject, and it is woman – and particularly the woman who identifies as lesbian or forms primary relationships with members of her own sex – who tends to be assigned these roles” (Palmer 1999, 14). Accordingly, Ann Radcliffe’s gothic fiction, with female characters at the center of it, has been read as a lesbian narrative. “Radcliffe and her female peers introduce a number of motifs which, though not specifically lesbian, lend themselves to lesbian adaptation” (Palmer 1999, 10).
Setting the films in the sublime sceneries ––castle, caves, coasts–– to unfold the lesbian love stories, Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Celine Sciamma, 2019) and Ammonite (Francis Lee, 2020) openly claim the sublime as lesbian when the women harness its power and limitlessness and project their subversive sexuality to it. The lesbian sublime hand-picks the features of the sublime, only to unfold the lesbian desire within the sublime spaces in the films. Within the lesbian sublime, gender, sexual, and social class hierarchies collapse as women navigate the interior and exterior spaces freely without interruptions imposed by unwanted male pressure. Nature welcomes as much as it overwhelms, and the ruins and remains appear as undefined spaces for women to express their desires and rewrite their sexual politics.
Figure 1 Wanderer above the see of fog (1817) courtesy of Hamburg Kunsthalle
Castle and Cave in the Lesbian Sublime: Portrait of a Lady on Fire
Portrait is set in a gothic castle on a French island. The castle in Portrait appears as both a conventional gothic space and an unorthodox structure. With its mysteries, secrets, subversive structure, and desires, in the castle of Portrait, we see the distortion of the patriarchal authority,the collapse of social order, and the transgression of sexual assumptions. As a gothic space, the castle appears “‘mysterious, [… and] hides some family secrets the revelation of which usually helps the heroine to disclose her own identity” (Raškauskienė 2009, 53-54). Replacing the hetero-patriarchal image of the castle with a female-centric society, the castle also provides a utopic social class order with Heloise, the noblewoman, Marianne, the intellectual artist, and Sophie, the working-class maid. Placing the women in artist and model positions, Portrait’s heroines, Marianne and Heloise, engage in a lesbian romance as they recognize their subversive desire.
Portrait extends this subversion also to caves and cliffs along the coast where mystery, terror, and death of the sublime haunt the women and yet expose their lesbian desire. The sublime in Portrait reflects Heloise’s rage against the imposed marriage on her, her sister’s suicide to escape the marriage, Marianne’s secret mission on the island as the commissioned artist, and eventually, the subversive desire that grows gradually between them. By unfolding these emotions within the sublime, the film opts for an unfamiliar set of devices to unfold lesbian love and subjectivity in conventionally male-dominated spaces.
The overwhelming setting of Portrait empowers rebellious intentions and promises the flourishing of a subversive desire and the growth of physical intimacy between Marianne and Heloise. The women hold hands as they help each other climb the rocks and eventually kiss at a cave in a mountainous area for the first time. Kathy A. Fedorko recognizes caves and cabins as “female-identified” places to safeguard the female character from male intrusion (2017, 18). The masculinization of the space and the imposed hetero-patriarchy draw the female figures in gothic fiction to seek alternative spaces away from male control or violence, and the abandoned caves and cabins provide a safe refuge for women to express their suppressed desires and rewrite their sexual politics.
Figure 2 Frame grab of Portrait: Marianne and Heloise walking along the cliffs
Figure 3 Frame grab of Portrait: Marianne and Heloise kissing at the cave
Coast and Cabin in the Lesbian Sublime: Ammonite
Ammonite similarly unfolds the lesbian love story within the sublime scenery of the coast, rocks, and cliffs. Ammonite is set in 19th-century England and narrates the story of Mary Anning (Kate Winslet), the famous fossil hunter who hosts Charlotte (Saoirse Ronan), an aristocratic young woman suffering from melancholia. As Charlotte accompanies Mary to the coast, the women gradually develop a romantic relationship as they hunt for fossils together.
Ammonite presents the home similar to the Radcliffean gothic novel where “greatest evil women must fear comes from within the sanctified family, […] The home may be a man’s castle but women are no more secure there than the savage wilds of nature” (Mellor 1993, 94). Although Charlotte’s mansion is not a conventional gothic space, as a hetero-patriarchal home, it is deprived of safety and sanity for its female resident. Her short residence in Mary’s house, promises the growth of intimacy and lays the groundwork for Charlotte and Mary to recognize a common ground and subvert its conventions through their subversive desire. The film transcends the gender and sexual assumptions of the sublime and establishes a lesbian sublime where women’s emotional, physical, and intellectual needs are nurtured.
Figure 4 Frame grab of Ammonite: Mary and Charlotte hunt rocks at the coast.
Figure 5 Frame grab of Ammonite: Charlotte’s cabin to heal melancholia.
References
Burke, Edmund (1844), A Philosophical Enquiry Into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful: With an Introductory Discourse Concerning Taste, New York: Harper & Brothers.
Fedorko, Kathy A ( 2017), Gender and the Gothic in the Fiction of Edith Wharton, Alabama: University of Alabama Press.
Kant, Immanuel (2007), Critique of Judgement, Oxford; New York: OUP Oxford.
Mellor, Anne K (1993), Romanticism & Gender, New York: Routledge.
Adam NeikirkComments Off on Reminder: CFP Closing soon for Wordsworth Summer Conference
Call for Papers
We invite proposals for twenty-minute papers on all aspects of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, their contemporaries and the Romantic period. We also welcome proposals on all topics related to Romantic period culture and literature and likewise welcome panel suggestions of 2-3 papers).
Papers that identify a bicentenary Wordsworth theme linking the 1820s to the 2020s will be welcomed and, as the 1820s was a productive decade, possible topics might include the Duddon Sonnets and Topographical Description (1820), Vaudracour and Julia, A Description of the Scenery of the Lakes (1822), Memorials of a Tour on the Continent (1820), Ecclesiastical Sketches (1822), Poetical Works (1827), and the Galignani Poetical Works (1828). Further themes for papers might include Dorothy Wordsworth’s writings in the 1820s, the Wordsworth family in the 1820s, the natural world, industry, steam power, and Wordsworthian travels in the 1820s.
Please note that participants presenting papers must attend as full participants for either all of Part 1 or all of Part 2, or the whole ten-day conference.
Papers should not be longer than 2750 words.
All proposals for papers, bursary applications (and references, if applicable) should be emailed by 25 April 2025 to
200-word proposals for papers of no more than 2750 words, together with a brief autobiographical paragraph, unformatted, should occupy no more than 1 side of A4 in MS Word format. Please remember to include your name, institution and e-mail address on the abstract. Please do not send proposals as a PDF file as they will be copied into a composite MS Word document.
Bursary applicants:
Your application should be in the form of a Word attachment (not PDF) containing a paper proposal of 300 words, together with a short unformatted cv in the same file, the entire application being not more than two sides of A4 (the file will be copied and pasted into a composite file, so please avoid elaborate formatting). Applicants should also arrange for a short letter of academic recommendation to be sent independently to the same email address (see above) verifying the applicant’s academic status and country of residence. Candidates need not specify which bursary they are applying for. They will automatically be considered for any bursary for which they are eligible. **Please be sure to identify your e-mail as ‘BURSARY APPLICATION’**.
Please note that we may award a bursary without having space to include the proposed paper on the conference programme: such papers may, however, be ‘taken as read’, that is, made available in print form at the conference, if the proposer so chooses.
Remember: paper proposals, bursary applications and references should be submitted by 25 April 2025 to proposal.wsc@gmail.com.
This conference builds on the recognition that, for a movement that resists easy definitions, Romanticism and its aesthetics have enjoyed a remarkably long life. Indeed, speaking of afterlives may raise the question whether Romanticism has in fact passed away. As Matthew Sangster has recently pointed out, the period retrospectively and hazily called Romanticism is not “over, done with, and transcended.” Cross-temporality seems to be inscribed in the history of the word, when translator and reviewer William Taylor, possibly the first to add “ism” to romantic, wrote in the Annual Review (1803) of the “romanticisms of speculative philosophy”, thus ushering into English a new concept marked from its birth by plurality and imaginative verve. The novelty was not lost on Lady Sidney Morgan who, in her 1821 study on Italy and contemporaneous aesthetics, embedded it in an animated European debate, by assuring readers that “The vehemence with which the question of Romanticism has been debated, will have a favourable influence upon the Italians” (Italy 2: 140). Writing of romanticisms in 1803 is echoed by twentieth-century scholars’ advancing of plural Romanticisms. As a modifier, “ism” endows Romanticism with a movement from the past, through the present and into the future via echoes, influences, revisions, and innovations in contemporary (counter-)cultures. In P. B. Shelley’s words, this conference wishes to explore “the many-voiced echoes” of Romanticisms and the multitudinous reanimations that highlight their continued relevance in contemporary (counter-)cultures.
Keynote speakers: Elizabeth Bohls (University of Oregon): “Witnessing Distant Suffering: Joe Sacco’s Footnotes in Gaza and Romantic Afterlife”
Eric Eisner (George Mason University): “Romanticism in Contemporary American Literature”
Free registration on Eventbrite. A detailed schedule of the conference can be found here. For further questions please contact: enit.steiner@unil.ch. We look forward to meeting you virtually.
Organisers: Enit K Steiner, Rachel Falconer, Philip Lindholm, Patrick Vincent.
Amy WilcocksonComments Off on BARS PGR & ECR Conference 2025 – REGISTRATION NOW OPEN
Dear All,
We’re excited to announce that registration is now open for the 2025 British Association for Romantic Studies (BARS) Early Career and Postgraduate Researcher Conference, Romantic (Un)Consciousness.
A copy of the provisional programme is available on the conference website. Please note that while panel times may be subject to change, the day on which delegates are scheduled to present will remain the same.
We warmly invite expressions of interest from delegates who would like to chair a panel. After reviewing the provisional programme, if you notice a session without a chair assigned and would be interested in taking on this role, please do get in touch. Your contribution would be greatly appreciated.
To register, please visit the ‘Registration’ section on our conference website and follow the instructions. The process includes selecting your registration option, making payment via PayPal (Debit/Credit Card payments can be made through the Paypal button), and completing the registration form to confirm your place:
Registration will close on August 1 2025 at midnight (GMT).
Accommodation and lunch are not included in the registration fee, and delegates are invited to source their own for the conference. A list of cafe and restaurant recommendations is available on the conference website. Delegates may like to book accommodation at Trinity Hall, Cambridge. For more details on the rooms, availability, and pricing, please visit the Trinity Hall conference accommodation webpage:
Bookings will open from approximately April 2025 and we encourage delegates to book early as availability is limited. Alternatively, Cambridge has a wide range of budget hotel and Airbnb options; other college rooms are available to book here.
Conference Dinner: registration is also open for the optional Conference Dinner, which will take place at The Eagle on Thursday 4th September at 7pm. Please register for this via the pre-order form and PayPal link on the conference website, and kindly remember to add a £2 service charge when transferring payment for your dinner pre-order.
Registration for both the conference and the conference dinner will close on Friday August 1 2025 at midnight (GMT).
Please do not hesitate to reach out with any questions, and we look forward to welcoming you to Cambridge and online in September!
Kind regards,
BARS PGR & ECR Team
Romantic (Un)Consciousness |
British Association for Romantic Studies Early Career and Postgraduate Conference |
University of Cambridge, 4-5 September 2025 | Online, 12 September 2025 |
