BARS Blog

a conference of the
Eighteenth-Century Scottish Studies Society

17–20 June 2025
University of Stirling
Stirling, Scotland

The annual conference of the ECSSS (www.ecsss.org) for 2025 will be held at the University of Stirling, Scotland. https://www.stir.ac.uk/about/faculties/arts-humanities/our-research/eighteenth-century-studies/events/ 

We invite proposals for 20-minute papers (or 90-minute panels or round tables) on any aspect of the conference theme, including approaches that are literary, philosophical, theological, historical, scientific or medical, social or political. Papers on other aspects of eighteenth-century Scottish thought and culture are also welcome.

Plenary addresses will be delivered by Richard Oram, Professor of Medieval and Environmental History, University of Stirling, on ‘We Need to Talk about “Improvement”: An Environmental History Perspective on “Improvement Era” Scotland’; Noelle Duckman Gallagher, University of Manchester, on ‘Disease and the Environment in the Art of Isaac Cruikshank (1764–1811); and Gerard Lee McKeever, University of Edinburgh, on ‘Hame and the Unheimlich: Eighteenth-Century Scotland’s Uncanny Environments’.

The conference will be held in the Pathfoot Building on the university campus, with a range of accommodation available in the Stirling Court Hotel and in our halls of residence, all on campus. We expect to arrange an excursion to one of the local libraries founded at the end of the seventeenth century; an evening concert of Scottish street ballads for street and for drawing-room; a walking tour of historic Stirling; and a conference dinner in the Stirling Court Hotel.

Please email a title and one-page description of your proposed three- or four-speaker panel or round table, or your proposed 20-minute paper, along with a one-page cv, by 15 November 2024 to Emma Macleod (e.v.macleod@stir.ac.uk) and Katie Halsey (katherine.halsey@stir.ac.uk).

You can also download the Eighteenth-Century Scottish Studies Society Call for Papers 2025 here.

Bath Spa University, School of Writing, Publishing and the Humanities and the

Adam Mickiewicz University Poznań, Faculty of Polish and Classical Philology

Inter-University Centre for the Study of Romanticism

would like to invite you to participate in the conference

Romantic Beginnings, Romantic Futures

June 4–5, 2025 in Poznań

One of the great passions of the European Romantics was the past and ideas about it, the passage of time, the mythical beginnings of humanity, and beliefs about the birth of nations. We would like to combine reflections on the past with thoughts on Romantic ideas of the future. An artist, thinker, or writer of the period was regarded as an expert in both spheres, one who can understand the ancestors and tell their version of history, but also as one who imagines the shape of the world in the future and knows the paths leading to it. 

The planned conference is inspired by the philosophical writings of Johann Gottfried Herder, especially the part where he deals with the methodology of literary research and the ways of doing historiography. Herder, who first compared the fate of people with the phases of plant life, created one of the key matrices of thinking about the human as a being subject to the effects of time. The thought of the creators of the late Enlightenment was a real challenge for the Romantics; the most difficult element was to accept the fact that the past resembles a construction put up by the present from the elements of material and immaterial heritage so as to respond to the relevant and current challenges of the world. Romantic historicism sought appropriate locations – mythical, primeval, and prehistoric times – to experience the passage of time, social and political tensions, the relationship between the individual and the collective, the complementary relationship between cultural memory and the professional study of the past. Moreover, all this was steeped in a belief that along with the three great revolutions of the age – the French, the Industrial, and the scientific one – the world stood at the threshold of a new beginning, a passage or crossing (‘Übergang’, as Hegel wrote in The Phenomenology of Spirit) into another reality, not yet recognized and demanding to be described. 

Confirmed plenary speakers:

Professor Paul Hamilton (Queen Mary University of London),

Professor Robert Morrison (Queen’s University, Ontario/Bath Spa University)

Dr hab. Zofia Dambek / Dr Aleksandra Sikorska (Adam Mickiewicz University Poznań)

Proposed topics in British Romanticism:

• From the Kilmarnock edition to the Lyrical Ballads 
• The Beginnings of the Gothic
• First-wave feminist writings 
• Writing the Future in the Post-Napoleonic Age
• Third Generation Romanticism 
• Romanticism and Science Fiction
• Post-Colonial Romanticism 

Proposed topics in Polish Romanticism:

• The importance of the Proto-Slavs in the history of the Slavic peoples
• Notions of beginnings: first people, first nations, ancient and distant cultures
• Conceptualizations of passing time in the lives of individuals and nations
• Great historiographical metaphors: growth, maturity, withering, and decline
• Romanticism as the beginning of a new literature

Proposed topics in comparative literature:

• Beginnings and futures in East/West European Romantic conversations  
• Imagining temporalities in Romantic British-Polish cultural exchanges
• Writing Slavic history in Romantic-period Britain
• Beginnings and unequal developments in European Romanticisms East and West
• Climate Change, Past and Present 
• The Future of Romantic Studies

The conference will be held in English on June 4–5, 2025 in Poznań. Please submit topic proposals (with an abstract of up to 300 words) with a short biography to junkiert@amu.edu.pl by the end of September 2024.

The organizers will not reimburse the cost of travel to Poznań and reserve the right to select the conference participants.

Hosts:

Prof. Maciej Junkiert (Poznań)

Prof. Diego Saglia (Parma)

Prof. John Strachan (Bath)

27^th-28^th June 2025

Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies, University of York, and online

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 announce a two-day hybrid and interdisciplinary conference which will celebrate these landmarks. This will be the first conference dedicated to Barbauld in over a decade, and will promote and build on important recent developments in Barbauld scholarship.

‘Anna Letitia Barbauld: Voicing Dissent’ will investigate the importance of dissenting thought and feeling for Barbauld’s poetry and prose, and will explore the legacy of her work in much more recent voicings of religious and political dissent. William McCarthy in his landmark biography named Barbauld a ‘Voice of the Enlightenment’; hers was an influential mode of enlightenment, mediated by Dissent.

Barbauld was celebrated during her lifetime as a poet of genius, an innovative teacher and writer for children, and a powerful polemicist, but her reputation was distorted and eclipsed in the nineteenth century and her achievements have only gradually been recovered. Increasingly, scholars have noted the importance of Barbauld’s dissenting identity for her creative and political achievements. She was a member of a Dissenting Protestant community excluded from social and political circles of power, but protested what she termed ‘the mark of separation set upon us’ and used her outsider status – both as a dissenter and a woman – to protest contemporary injustices, and to support the causes of social and political reform, including the abolition of the slave trade. For Barbauld, dissent was not only the source of her civic identity but also of her profound religious faith. New research is now revealing the significance of devotional forms, customs and practices for her creative and political work.

We focus in this conference on the ‘voices’ of dissent in Barbauld’s work. She commanded, in Isobel Grundy’s words, a ‘various set of voices’, and 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. Such voicings were informed by dissenting practices, but Barbauld produced powerfully creative responses to these traditions, and in turn inspired strong legacies of creative and polemical expression in her own lifetime and since.

Our confirmed keynote speakers are: Professor Emma Clery; Professor Elizabeth Kraft; Professor Scott Krawczyk; Professor William McCarthy.

We invite proposals for 20-minute papers and pre-formed panels of three, to be delivered in-person or online. We especially encourage submissions from early-career researchers and independent scholars. To propose a paper or panel, please send an abstract of around 250 words per presentation to barbauld2025@gmail.com before midnight on Friday 1 November 2024.

Possible themes for papers include, but are not limited to:

·      Barbauld’s dissenting life and community

·      Barbauld’s poetics of religious and political dissent

·      Barbauld’s abolitionist and anti-war writings

·      Barbauld’s engagements with devotional forms and practices

·      The oral and aural contexts of Barbauld’s dissent

·      Barbauld’s engagement with her dissenting contemporaries, male and female

·      Nineteenth- and twentieth-century legacies of Barbauld’s anti-war writing and ecofeminist thought

·      Connections between Romantic-era and contemporary literatures of political and religious dissent

·      The limits of Barbauld’s dissent

A small number of bursaries will be available to support attendance by students and early career researchers. Please indicate in your submission if you wish to be considered for a bursary, briefly outlining your case for support.

Organisers: Professor Mary Fairclough and Dr Joanna Wharton