CfP: Framing the Human (19th-C. Studies Assoc. Conference, 2027)

      Comments Off on CfP: Framing the Human (19th-C. Studies Assoc. Conference, 2027)

Framing the Human in the Nineteenth Century

48th Annual Conference

Nineteenth-Century Studies Association

Philadelphia, PA

March 11-13, 2027

Conference website: https://ncsaweb.net/2027-conference-information/

Call for Proposals
Submission Deadline: October 31, 2026
Notification of Acceptance: January 2027
Please submit proposals via this Google Form
Questions? Email the conference organizers at ncsa2027conference@gmail.com 

The Nineteenth-Century Studies Association (NCSA) invites proposals for 15-minute papers (300-word proposal) or complete panels of 3-4 papers (600-word proposal) that examine the shifting meanings and status of “the human” in the long nineteenth century—a period shaped by transformative scientific, social, and philosophical developments that continue to inform present-day thought. During this time, evolutionary theory and social Darwinism challenged the boundaries between humans and animals and raised new questions about human difference across race, class, and ethnicity. Theological and philosophical discourses reevaluated humanity’s relationship to the divine, while pseudosciences such as phrenology, physiognomy, and anthropometry sought to codify human variation through tools of measurement often aligned with colonial and racial hierarchies. Advances in the natural sciences speculated on human origins and extraterrestrial life, situating “the human” within a larger cosmic framework. Industrialization redefined labor and bodily limits, generating anxieties about overpopulation, and paradoxically, race suicide and population extinction. Amid these pressures, labor and voting rights movements gained momentum, as marginalized groups fought for full inclusion. We welcome proposals from a variety of disciplines that engage with these and other transformations that redefined what it meant to be human—and to belong to humanity—across the long nineteenth century.

Topics may include, but are not limited to:

  • The influence of evolutionary theory on concepts of the human and the human/animal divide, including artistic and literary responses
  • Scientific efforts to define human origins and difference through anthropology, racial theory, and other emerging disciplines
  • Population anxieties related to degeneration, overpopulation, and demographic change
  • Emancipated and enslaved bodies
  • The effects of industrialization and technological advancement on understandings of the human body, labor, and automation
  • The rise of the human sciences—psychology, physiology, and medicine—and new approaches to the mind and self
  • Migration and the movement of people, and their impact on ideas of race, nation, and identity
  • Secularization and shifting relationships between the human and the divine
  • Changing human relationships to the environment and the nonhuman world
  • Human rights, labor, and suffrage movements and the redefinition of personhood
  • Transformations in education and access to knowledge
  • The role of cultural institutions (museums, libraries, exhibitions) in shaping public and humanist discourse

—-

Meoghan B. Cronin

Call for Applications: BARS Communications Fellow 2026-27

      Comments Off on Call for Applications: BARS Communications Fellow 2026-27

The British Association for Romantic Studies (BARS) would like to invite applications for a Communications Fellow to assist with the BARS Blog and social media for a period of one year tenable from September 2026. We are looking for someone with previous experience of using blogs and social media for academic purposes. This position is paid an honorarium of £750 and is open to all postgraduate students and early career researchers working in Romantic Studies anywhere in the world. This role will require around 1-2 hours per week.

Responsibilities will include:

  • Leading and contributing to existing BARS Blog series, including ‘On This Day’ and ‘Romantic Reimaginings’.
  • Proposing and curating new blog posts/series.
  • Writing, filming, and creating TikTok videos.
  • Liasing with contributors to the blog/TikTok/social media.
  • Delivering an active and strategic social media presence.
  • Attending online meetings with members of the BARS Executive Committee.

The successful applicant will work closely with the Communications Officer.

This post is an excellent career-development opportunity for a student or early career researcher. You will have the chance to develop valuable skills in the field of scholarly communications and to contribute to the BARS postgraduate community. You will gain valuable skills (website management, content creation and digital communications) which will be useful in academic and non-academic roles alike. We expect that this role will be held alongside other academic or professional commitments such as completing a research project and/or teaching, and we encourage flexible working. 

Essential requirements:

  • Student or early career researcher
  • Interest in British Romanticism and Romanticism more broadly
  • A member of BARS

Desirable experience: 

  • Previous involvement in writing or editing blog posts 
  • Experience of using WordPress 
  • Skilled in using social media for professional purposes, specifically experience of using BlueSky, TikTok, and Facebook

To apply: please send an academic CV (up to two pages) and personal statement of 500 words explaining why you are best placed to undertake the duties above to britishassociationromantic@gmail.com by Monday 14 September 2026. Informal enquiries can be directed to current Comms Officer Amy Wilcockson at a.wilcockson@qmul.ac.uk.

Five Questions: Emily Wing Rohrbach on Codex Poetics

      Comments Off on Five Questions: Emily Wing Rohrbach on Codex Poetics

Emily Wing Rohrbach is Associate Professor of English, 1660-1832, at Durham University and the author of Modernity’s Mist: British Romanticism and the Poetics of Anticipation (Fordham University Press, ‘Lit Z’ series, 2016). She is also co-editor (with Emily Sun) of the 50th-anniversary issue of Studies in Romanticism entitled Reading Keats, Thinking Politics (2011). In 2022-23, she held a Leverhulme Research Fellowship to support work on her new book, Codex Poetics and the Politics of Romantic Reading (Cambridge University Press, ‘Studies in Romanticism’ series, 2026).

1) How did you first become interested in how Romantic-period books foster notions of contingency?

That’s an easy one. In my first book, Modernity’s Mist, I explored Romantic ideas of contingency in both literature and historiography. That interest brought me to a symposium in May 2016 on the topic of ‘literature and contingency’. There, I was fascinated by how several book historians were talking about contingency in material terms. I’d thought about the issue of contingency a lot with respect to narrative theory, poetics, and intellectual history, but I had not thought at all about contingencies of ‘the book’ as a material object with specific affordances and histories. As I was listening to their talks, which covered a wide range of historical periods up to the contemporary, I was also rereading in my head Keats’s poem ‘On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again’. That’s where and when the project began. At the symposium, there were two mostly distinct conversations happening, and I thought I could see how they could be bridged with a work like Keats’s astonishing sonnet and its history of being inspired by a blank space in his Shakespeare book.

2) You write in the introduction that ‘Codex Poetics is a book about what interpretations become possible when, methodologically, we take account of […] poetics and format […] and how they might play off one another’. What for you are the biggest gains we make by paying proper attention to the ways in which bound books and their contents frame each other’s potential meanings?

‘Books’ in the Romantic period have been understood, at times, as forces of discipline and stabilization. But as my readings aim to show, when you attend to the play between format and poetics—or, as you say, bound books and their contents—one thing that comes into view is an idea of ‘the book’ as a force that illuminates things as they are as not inevitable, but formed by choice and chance. In the Romantic period, the very technology of the bound book—with pages held together by a binding that enables it to open and close and to be flipped through—gets enlisted in that reflexive and conceptualizing work. Noticing this play also shows you just how carefully, inventively, and sometimes anxiously these authors imagined the material forms in which their words would circulate.

3) How did you come to select the principal subjects for your chapters (Ignatius Sancho, Phillis Wheatley and Olaudah Equiano; Jane Austen; Letitia Elizabeth Landon; John Keats and Leigh Hunt; and William Hazlitt)?

It would have been possible to include the work of other authors in this study—to make it a book about poetry alone, for example—but I wanted to show that the conceptualizing ‘work’ described in my previous answer was happening across literary genres. Early on, I found that the exposing of things as they are as contingent was potentially liberating and, for an author such as William Hazlitt, very explicitly associated with certain kinds of freedom. That led me to ask, given that this was an age of British involvement in the global slave trade and abolitionist movements, whether the book operated in a similar way for authors of African descent. The answer, I found, is yes and no. Finally, once I had the research questions in mind, I selected the authors and works that gave the most complex, subtle, and surprising answers to these questions. I didn’t want to write a boring book.

4) What are your favourite surprising things that you discovered in the process of researching the book?

To me, each chapter feels so different from the others that it’s hard to say which surprised me most. But I was certainly surprised by how often some Romantic poets describe spaces for their books (their study, their shelves) specifically using the word ‘snug’. I was intrigued, too, to find affinities between Hazlitt and Sancho on the topic of repeat reading, and between Hazlitt and Equiano on the free play of subject-object positions vis-à-vis the book. You’d probably be surprised to hear me say that Austen envisions even Sir Walter’s beloved Baronetage as having a democratizing edge. Finally, although this may not be what your question was getting at, I was definitely surprised by how much work it took to finish this project. That said, it’s probably a good thing not to know the actual timeframe for completion when setting out.

5) What new projects are you currently working on?

Apart from writing a few short pieces on various topics, I’m now revisiting something in Romantic poetry that I started to notice while writing Codex Poetics: that is, moments in poems when a description of something in the natural world—a leaf, a landscape—turns into a description of a page or a book; or, vice versa. Romanticism is sometimes preoccupied with exploring what nature teaches versus what books teach, and I’m trying to think about what these kinds of moments uniquely say about that question. I grew up on a farm and only later came to value reading, so I guess that personal history is where my own preoccupation comes from.

BARS Election 2026: Results

      Comments Off on BARS Election 2026: Results

The election results are now in following the close of voting at 11:59pm on Monday 27 July. We received 25 responses in total, and the eligibility of all voters has been checked and confirmed. The results are as follows:

BARS President

  • Matthew Sangster: 24
  • None of the above – reopen nominations: 1
  • Abstain: 0

BARS Treasurer

  • Mary Fairclough: 24
  • None of the above – reopen nominations: 1
  • Abstain: 0

As such, Matthew Sangster and Mary Fairclough will continue in their roles as BARS President and BARS Treasurer respectively. These successful candidates will serve two-year terms. BARS’ next round of elections will be in 2027.

BARS Online Conference 2028 Reminder: Thursday 6th August

      Comments Off on BARS Online Conference 2028 Reminder: Thursday 6th August

Thank you to all attendees of the in-person portion of BARS 2026 ‘Romantic Retrospection’ at the University of Birmingham.

It was a wonderful few days which we hope all attendees thoroughly enjoyed! We would like to extend our thanks to Jessica Fay, Andrew Hodgson, Matthew Ward, the student helpers and support teams at the University of Birmingham for a fantastically-organised event.

A final reminder that the online conference is taking place tomorrow, Thursday 6th August starting at 12 noon (UK time).

The event will culminate in the Marilyn Butler Lecture, given at 8pm by Nikki Hessell of Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. Professor Hessell’s title is ‘Treaties Recollected in Tranquillity’.

All who attended the in-person conference are automatically registered for the online day, so please do join us for any or all of the panel sessions or keynote lecture. A full programme is below and Zoom links will be circulated on Wednesday.

BARS-Online-Programme-3-August-2026Download


If you would like to attend the online conference tomorrow, there’s still time to book here: https://shop.bham.ac.uk/conferences-and-events/college-of-arts-law/school-of-english-drama-american-canadian-studies/online-british-association-of-romantic-studies-conference-2026

Please also look out for a link to the digital version of the Ernest de Sélincourt exhibition, which will go live later this week in conjunction with the online events.  

5/8/26

BARS Review Editor 2026-2028 Announced

      Comments Off on BARS Review Editor 2026-2028 Announced

BARS is delighted to announce the result of the appointment for BARS Review Editor, confirmed for a term to last until summer 2028.

We are thrilled that Irene Valenti has been appointed to the role, following a rigorous application process. Many thanks to all the excellent candidates who applied.

Irene is a PhD candidate and research assistant at the University of Augsburg, where she also works as editorial assistant for Anglia – Journal of English Philology. Her dissertation explores theories of the sublime from a new materialist perspective, engaging specifically with the daemonic in Romantic poetry. Her research interests include gender and queer studies and contemporary (body-)horror narratives.

We would like to extend our thanks to Dr Caroline Anjali Ritchie for her service to BARS as Review Editor for the past two years and for her contributions to the wider Executive.

For more information on The BARS Review, please see here. Dr Ritchie’s excellent final issue as editor (No. 62, 2026) has recently been published and is available to read!

If you would like to review a publication for The BARS Review, please contact Irene at barsrevieweditor@gmail.com.

BARS Executive
24/07/26

BARS PGR and ECR Representatives 2026–2028 Announced

      Comments Off on BARS PGR and ECR Representatives 2026–2028 Announced

Supporting Postgraduates and Early Career Researchers has always been an important part of the remit of the British Association for Romantic Studies. As such, we are thrilled to announce the appointment of a PGR representative and two ECR representatives to the BARS Executive for the period 2026-2028.

Welcome to Emma Butler (Edge Hill University), who will take the position of PGR representative. Emma will represent our Postgraduate members and students in the field more generally.

Emma is a current PhD researcher at Edge Hill University working on her thesis, ‘From Health to Leisure: The Seaside in the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination’. Emma’s research interests span the Romantic and Victorian period and include Jane Austen, seaside literature, disability studies/health humanities, and the Gothic. She was the 2025 BARS Chawton House Visiting Fellow, where she spent a month engrossed in obscure novels set in coastal spaces.

We also welcome Dr Laura Brook (University of Edinburgh) and Dr Serena Qihui Pei (University College London), as ECR representatives. Laura and Serena will represent our early career members and early career researchers in the field more broadly.

Laura Brook holds a PhD in English Literature from the University of Edinburgh. Her research centres on the representation of early nineteenth-century patienthood in the life and works of John Keats, with a particular focus on medicine ‘from below’. Laura’s other research interests include disability studies, medical periodicals, and the history of anatomy.

Serena Qihui Pei is currently a Teaching Assistant at University College London, where she completed her PhD in English and Comparative Literature in 2025. Her research focuses on the intersections of British Romanticism, Chinese philosophy, Sino-British cultural exchange during the 18th and 19th centuries, and the environmental humanities. Her peer-reviewed articles and book reviews have appeared in The Coleridge Bulletin, the Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics, the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, and The Charles Lamb Bulletin, as well as in the edited collection Non-Western Approaches in Environmental Humanities (Göttingen: Brill|V&R unipress, 2025). Her research has received support and recognition through the Stephen Copley Research Award and funding from BARS, the Keats-Shelley Memorial Association, the Friends of Coleridge, and the Charles Lamb Society. She is an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (AFHEA) and was recently elected an Associate Fellow of the Royal Historical Society (RHS).  

—

Thank you to all who applied for these roles – competition was fierce. Thank you too to our outgoing PGR representatives Kate Nankervis and Zooey Ziller, for their hard work over the past two years. A huge thanks also to our outgoing ECR representative Dr Cleo O’Callaghan Yeoman for her diligence and commitment to BARS during her terms as PGR and ECR representative – we’ll miss you all!

BARS Executive
23/07/26

BARS Conference 2026 Final Registration: ‘Romantic Retrospection’ at the University of Birmingham

      Comments Off on BARS Conference 2026 Final Registration: ‘Romantic Retrospection’ at the University of Birmingham

Next week, the University of Birmingham hosts the British Association for Romantic Studies international conference. The conference theme, Romantic Retrospection, has led to a diverse range of papers, sessions, and roundtables, covering a variety of topics, authors, and approaches. We have panels on everything from literary editing, life writing, and translation studies to digital Romanticism, Queer literary adaptations, and ecological criticism. This is an international conference in the reach of its sessions: as well as hosting delegates from 5 continents, we have panels on German, Scottish, Irish, Italian, Scandinavian, and Spanish Romanticism, as well as the neo-Romanticism of writers from J.R.R Tolkien to Michael O’Neill.

We have around 250 delegates already signed up, but you can still register if you would like to attend — whether for all 3 days, or at a discounted 1-day rate. If you are unable to make it to Birmingham next week, but would like to be involved with the BARS conference, we also have the online conference taking place on Thursday 6th August, which can be registered for separately.

The conference programmes and further details — as well as information on how to register — can be found at the website below. 

https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/events/the-british-association-for-romantic-studies-international-conference-2026

CfP: 5th World Congress of Scottish Literatures: Scotland Along the New Silk Road

      Comments Off on CfP: 5th World Congress of Scottish Literatures: Scotland Along the New Silk Road

Call for Papers: 5th World Congress of Scottish Literatures: Scotland Along the New Silk Road (17-20 June 2027)

The Fifth World Congress of Scottish Literatures will be held at Nanjing Normal University in Nanjing, China, on 17-20 June 2027. Being China’s first city designated as a “UNESCO City of Literature”, Nanjing—the venue for this congress—is not only a time-honored ancient capital of six dynasties but also boasts a millennia-old literary heritage. The main theme of this congress, “Scotland Along the New Silk Road”, underscores the dynamic interplay between Scottish literature with the diverse literary landscapes along this transcontinental bridge of cultural exchanges.

In ancient times, the Silk Road served as a historic trade route connecting East and West, fostering economic and cultural communications across continents. Today, the New Silk Road has evolved into a global network spanning Asia-Pacific, Africa, and Europe, acting as a dynamic bridge for economic collaboration and cross-cultural dialogue in an interconnected world. For Scotland, this initiative indicates a two-way exchange: Scottish literature is increasingly translated and published in New Silk Road countries, while Scotland’s own cultural narrative is enriched through deep engagement with these regions’ literary traditions. By situating Scottish literature within this transcontinental framework, this congress seeks to foster reciprocal understanding and cultural collaborations between Scotland and the diverse voices of the New Silk Road.

In light of this, the Steering Committee welcomes proposals for papers that explore these or any of the following themes in relation to Scotland’s literatures (suggested but not restricted to the following):    

  • Imagining “the Orient” in Scottish Literature
  • Scottish Writers Writing from Asia 
  • The Reception of Scottish Writers and Culture in Asia
  • The Reception of Chinese Material and Intellectual Culture in Scotland 
  • Folk Traditions in Transcultural Contexts: Scotland and Eurasian Cultural Exchanges
  • Whisky and Tea: Material Culture Exchanges Along the Maritime Silk Road
  • Eco-Writings in the Anthropocene: Scotland, Silk Road and Beyond
  • Aesthetics and Literature in the Scottish Enlightenment 
  • Nineteenth-Century Scottish Literature
  • Rethinking Canonical Scottish Writers
  • Contemporary Scottish Literature and World Literature

We welcome more topics about Scottish literature, and we also welcome pre-organized panels. In keeping with the conference’s focus on dialogue and in order to maximize discussion and participation, panel organizers are encouraged to explore alternatives to the traditional format of three to four papers, such as workshops or roundtables.

Please note that in the interest of involving as many people as possible, participants are asked to present only one paper at the congress; however, they may also serve on a roundtable/discussion or as a discussant. Papers in English, Scots, Gaelic, Chinese and indigenous languages are welcomed. The working languages for this congress are English and Chinese. For speeches delivered in languages other than English, we recommend preparing English translations in advance either in paper or in PowerPoint.  

Please note that the deadline for ALL proposal submissions is 30 November 2026.

Please visit the IASSL website here for more information and to submit your proposals: https://scotlit-iassl.org/2025/11/11/nanjingcfp/

——-

IASSL

Hazlitt Society Annual Lecture and Day event: 19th September 2026

      Comments Off on Hazlitt Society Annual Lecture and Day event: 19th September 2026

The Hazlitt Society annual lecture and Hazlitt day-school will take place this year on Saturday 19th September 2026. 

The annual lecture will take place at 4pm, at the end of the full day event, which is broadly themed around the bicentenary of the publication of Hazlitt’s last major essay collection, The Plain Speaker, in 1826. 

This year’s annual lecture is given by Stefan Uhlig (University of California Davis), on ‘Hazlitt’s Plain Aesthetics‘

The venue for the whole day and the lecture is Clarke Hall, Institute of Education, 20 Bedford Way, London WC1H 0AL (between Russell and Tavistock Squares: NB slight change of UCL venue). 

To register for the whole day event, please use the UCL webstore. There is a fee (£20/15 concessions) to cover the cost of catering (morning and afternoon tea and coffee, lunch) which is included. https://onlinestore.ucl.ac.uk/conferences-and-events/faculty-of-arts-humanities-c01/department-of-english-language-literature-f10/f10-hazlitt-day-school-lecture-2026

To register for the annual lecture only, which is free, please email hazlittsociety@gmail.com

Programme:
9.30am     Arrival and registration, tea and coffee (provided)
10-11.15    Opening plenary: Tim Fulford (De Montfort), ‘Hazlitt and Coleridge’
11.15       Break
11.45-1.15  Merrilees Roberts (Cambridge), ‘Echoes of Liber Amoris in ‘The Pleasures of Hating’: Approaching ‘the object’’
John Whale (Leeds), ‘The Politics of Plainness’
1.15-2.15   Lunch
2.15-3.45   Dylan Carver (Oxford), ‘Hazlitt, Party Politics, and the Rules of Political Warfare’
David Woodhouse, ‘On the Jealousy and Spleen of Liberals’
3.45        Break
4-5.30      Annual Lecture: Stefan Uhlig (University of California Davis), ‘Hazlitt’s Plain Aesthetics’
5.30        Drinks (Marlborough Arms, Torrington Place)

—————

James Whitehead