BARS 2023 First Book Prize: Call for Nominations

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Awarded biennially for the best first monograph in Romantic Studies, this prize is open to first monographs published between 1 January 2021 and 31 December 2022. In keeping with the remit of the British Association for Romantic Studies, the prize is designed to encourage and recognise original, ground-breaking and interdisciplinary work in the literature and culture of the period c. 1780-1830. The prize is awarded to the value of £300.

The BARS Executive has appointed a panel of judges consisting of: Prof Mary Fairclough (York); Dr Yimon Lo (Tübingen and Leuven); Dr Brianna Robertson-Kirkland (RCS and Glasgow). The panel is chaired by Prof Simon Kövesi (Glasgow).

Eligibility, Nomination and Submission

The competition is open to scholarly monographs published in English by authors who have not published a monograph before. Books can be nominated by publishers, by members of BARS, or by the author themselves, using the form below. Nominations should attest to the significance of the book’s scholarly contribution, detailing its particular strengths and describing the nature of its originality in no more than 300 words. To ensure this remains a prize for Early Career Academics, the book’s official date of publication will be no later than 10 years after the award of the author’s PhD.

Nomination-formDownload

Deadlines: nomination forms, accompanied by e-copies or hardcopies of the book submitted, should be received by the chair of the panel no later than 15 July 2023. The award will be announced in the autumn of 2023.

Email address for all submissions and queries: simon.kovesi@glasgow.ac.uk.

Postal address for hardcopies of books: Prof. Simon Kövesi, School of Critical Studies, 5, University Gardens (Room 304), University of Glasgow, G12 8QH, Scotland.

Call for Applications: Stephen Copley Research Award

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Postgraduates and early career scholars working in the area of Romanticism/those working on the expansive era the Romantic period covered are invited to apply for a Stephen Copley Research Award.  

Deadline for this round: 15 June 2023

The BARS Executive Committee has established the bursaries in order to help fund research expenses up to a maximum of £500.  Expenses may include but are not limited to the cost of travel and accommodation related to archival or research-focused trips, as well as photocopying, scanning, and childcare.  

A postgraduate must be enrolled on a doctoral programme in the UK; an early career scholar is defined as someone who holds a PhD (from the UK) but has not held a permanent academic post for more than three years by the application deadline.  Application for the awards is competitive, and cannot be made retrospectively.

Successful applicants must be members of BARS before taking up the award. The names of recipients will be announced on the BARS website and social media, and successful applicants will be asked to submit a short report to the BARS Executive Committee within four weeks of the completion of the research trip and to acknowledge BARS in their doctoral thesis and/or any publication. Reports may also be published on the BARS Blog where this is appropriate. Previous winners or applicants are encouraged to apply again.

Please send the following information in support of your application (up to two pages of A4 maximum in word.doc format):

  • Your full name and institutional affiliation (if any).
  • The working title and a short abstract or summary of your PhD or current project.
  • A brief description of the research to be undertaken for which you need support.
  • An estimated costing for the proposed research trip.
  • Estimated travel dates.
  • Details of current or recent funding (AHRC award, &c), if applicable.
  • The name of one supervisor/referee (with email address) to whom application can be made for a supporting reference on your behalf.
  • The name and contact details (including email address and Twitter handle) of whomever updates your departmental website or social media, if known.  And your own Twitter handle, if applicable.

Applications and queries should be directed to the bursaries officer, Dr Gerard Lee McKeever (gerard.mckeever@ed.ac.uk) at the University of Edinburgh.

There are two rounds of the scheme in each year. The deadlines are June 15th and December 15th.

Announcement: Incoming BARS Executive Members

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Following the recent BARS Executive elections, the details of the incoming members are now available on the BARS website: 

The BARS Executive

Our thanks to all who stood for election, and those who voted. Many thanks also to our outgoing Executive members, who will be missed.

On behalf of the newest Executive members, we look forward to working with the BARS Membership! – Amy Wilcockson, Communications Officer. 

Call for Papers- Influence: 50 Years On

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Magdalen College, Oxford

25 September 2023

Keynotes: Professor Anahid Nersessian (UCLA; author, The Calamity Form and Keats’s Odes)  Dr Adam Phillips (general editor of Freud for Penguin Books) 

Email abstracts (250 words) and bios (75 words) to influenceoxford@gmail.com.  

Deadline for submissions: Friday 26 May.  

Texts influence one another and influence us as readers. Half a century ago, Harold Bloom evolved a template  for understanding the process of poetic influence in The Anxiety of Influence, which he characterized as an  agonised and agonistic misreading of great precursors, by authors under the pressure of Freudian anxiety.  However, the land lies differently in 2023, and the essential questions that Bloom tackled are inviting new  answers and methodologies from across the discipline of literary studies. 

This conference invites papers which consider influence as an Anglophone literary phenomenon over the last  five centuries. It is concerned with the theory of influence, specific examples of it, and new methods in  criticism and research, whether imaginative, technical, or speculative. Approaches from neighbouring  disciplines such as history, philosophy, and anthropology are welcome. Papers should be a maximum of 20  minutes long and are invited on all aspects of literary influence, including:  

❖ ‘Influence’ as a critical or historical concept 

❖ Influence beyond the canon 

» Recovering forgotten or marginalized influences 

» Post-colonial influence 

» Influence across borders 

» Queer influences 

» Influence between social divides 

❖ Influence between eras 

❖ Influence between genres, or between non-‘literary’ and ‘literary’ 

❖ The influence of non-authorial agents on the shape of a text 

❖ Memory, mistakes, misreading, and misremembering 

❖ Theoretical approaches to influence, such as ‘paranoid reading’, deconstruction, and intentionalism 

❖ The problems of revision, multiple authorship, or anonymity 

❖ The influence of critical schools and the academy 

Papers might also treat the anniversary of Bloom’s book as a springboard, approaching topics such as: 

❖ Renaissance influence. Bloom believed that the early moderns, the ‘giant age before the flood’, were influenced differently to later eras. How, then, did Renaissance writers make sense of influence and influence once another, and how has their influence subsequently been felt? 

❖ The ‘apocalypse’ of influence studies? How are the digital humanities rethinking ‘source hunting’ and ‘allusion counting’ in the 21st century? Has there been a noticeable shift ‘from scholars to computers’ – the move Bloom thought would spell the ‘apocalypse’ of the industry? 

❖ Psychologising influence. How far is it true that literary influence is a psychological process, tapping into fears, memories, or prejudices beyond the aesthetic? What about the tension between outside influence and the self? Can influence be a form of self-fashioning? 

Either way, it seems like an appropriate tribute on the fiftieth anniversary to wrestle free of the great original;  swerve away from it; do something different. 

Convenors: Lewis Roberts (St John’s College, Cambridge); Jacob Ridley (University College, Oxford); Roddy Howland Jackson (Magdalen College, Oxford); Ruby Hutchings (Queens’ College, Cambridge).  Email: influenceoxford@gmail.com; Twitter: @influenceoxford 

The Year of Gothic Women, University of Dundee, 29-31 August 2023

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Register for the conference at this link.

The conference fee will be £100 for salaried delegates or £55 for unsalaried delegates (at the early bird rate). When you register for the conference, you will also be able to sign up for conference excursions and events, including the conference dinner.

The draft programme is available on our website: https://gothicwomenproject.wordpress.com/conference-the-year-of-gothic-women/

We have a limited number of £100 PGR / ECR / unwaged bursaries, kindly sponsored by BSECS and BARS. If you would like to apply for a bursary, please send an email to gothicwomenproject@gmail.com with the subject line ‘Bursary Application’, giving your name and paper title and your current funding / salary status.

Charles Brockden Brown Society Biennial Symposium, 14-17 September, University of Nottingham

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The Charles Brockden Brown Society is pleased to announce that registration for its next biennial conference is now open. The conference will be taking place at the University of Nottingham from 14th to 17th September 2023.

The full programme alongside registration link can be found here: The 14th Biennial Conference of the Charles Brockden Brown Society – The University of Nottingham.

The conference will be operating in hybrid format so non-speaking delegates attending remotely are welcome (and can enjoy a slightly discounted rate).

Please note the following: all registration fees will rise by £30 after June 1st; all attendees are also required to be members of the Brown Society (membership running for two years from the conference date) so will need to pay the required membership fee in addition to the registration fee; and finally, there are options during the registration process to pay in advance for the two field trips taking place during the conference and also to indicate whether you’ll be attending the conference dinner and/or the post-conference field trip (payment for these last two items will be arranged later).

CALL FOR PAPERS: Reimagining World Views Across Space and Time

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School of Arts PGR Conference: ‘Reimagining World Views Across Space and Time’

Saturday 18th November 2023, University of Leicester

Art represents, re-presents, misrepresents, subverts and reimagines the world. Philosophies,
ideologies and epistemes are disseminated, deconstructed and re-constructed through literature,
film, painting, sculpture, digital art, and other media.
This conference will explore how researchers in the Arts, and those working across disciplines,
examine creative works and ideas to identify world views – both old and new – and discover radical
or reformative approaches.

This is a call for all post-graduates undertaking a PhD, as well as post-doctoral researchers or early-
career researchers. We invite submissions that explore the theme ‘Reimagining World Views Across
Space and Time’. This topic refracts into several sub-topics, including:
● The role of art in building bridges in a diverse world
● Re-presenting, re-reading or re-imagining works and their creators
● Literary devices and/or genres
● History and the shape of time
● Intersectionality, unconscious bias and/or shared struggles
● Exploring gender and sexuality
● Decolonisation, power and space
● Neurotypicality, neuroatypicality, specific learning difficulties and different abilities
● Inter-disciplinarity and crossing boundaries
● Context and intertextuality
● Multimodality, ekphrasis and intermediality
● Theoretical refractions and re-interpretations of art
● Metafiction, self-reflexivity, fragmentation, incoherence or playfulness


If you would like to participate in the conference, the following options apply:
● Deliver a 20-minute oral presentation (and optional Q&A)
● Participate in a panel discussion (and optional Q&A)
● Present research in another creative format, such as a poster or showcase

Please upload your proposal, including a 150-word abstract and 100-word biography here. If you
have any issues, please email your submission to uolartspgrconference@gmail.com by 11:59 p.m.,
Friday 12th May 2023.
We are hoping to be able to offer modest travel bursaries for speakers living outside Leicester.
Please indicate whether you would like to be considered for this. Registration to attend the
conference will open mid-May 2023. The conference will be free to attend. We aim to provide a
safe, non-judgmental and inclusive environment for all attendees and participants. If you have any
questions, please contact us via the email address as above.

Five Questions: Yimon Lo on Musical Wordsworth

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Yimon Lo is Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Tübingen and Research Fellow at the University of Leuven. She researches eighteenth- and nineteenth- century British literature, with a particular focus on poetry and poetics. Her work has appeared in journals including Romanticism, English: Journal of the English Association, The Coleridge Bulletin and the Tennyson Research Bulletin. Her first book, Musical Wordsworth: Romantic Soundscape and Harmony, which we discuss below, was recently published by Liverpool University Press.

1) How did you first become interested in reading Wordsworth’s poetry through the lens of music and musicality?

Growing up with fond memories of playing instruments and going to classical concerts, I have always been fascinated by the close connection between poetry and music. Among the many Romantic poets, I was particularly drawn to the works of Wordsworth, but not because he was known for his musical abilities. Quite the contrary – he was criticised by some of his contemporaries as unmusical. For example, Edward Quillinan once commented that Wordsworth was a poet who ‘had no ear for instrumental music’, and Henry Crabb Robinson even poked fun at a time when Wordsworth fell asleep at a musical party. Despite these remarks, I thought that Wordsworth’s poetry contained very impressive musical references and auditory imagery, as well as complex thematic and stylistic engagements with the music of verse.

So this made me wonder: How can we define the sense of musicality in Wordsworth’s poetry? What is the function of his musical ideas in theory and practice? How did Wordsworth transfer his understanding of formal and metrical musicality to his representations of the imaginative effects of auditory perception?

2) In your introduction, you write that ‘The principal aim of this book is to examine Wordsworth’s unique expression of poetic harmony’.  How did you decide to place harmony at the book’s heart?

I didn’t have harmony as a central theme in mind when I first set out to write my book. However, as I delved deeper into Wordsworth’s poetic theory and practice, I found that the word kept appearing in his works, in both his prose and verse. One of the most striking examples is his representation of the poetic mind as ‘framed even like the breath / And harmony of music.’ Wordsworth also believed that ‘a pure and refined scheme of harmony’ should prevail in all ‘higher poetry’. In ‘the music of harmonious metrical language’, he locates ‘a complex feeling of delight’. Even in his thoughts on poetic form, harmony was a guiding principle. Wordsworth looked to ‘the dignified simplicity and majestic harmony’ of Milton’s sonnets as a model for his private reflection and public preoccupations.

This idea of harmony extends beyond just the sound of the words themselves. The complex and multifarious connotations of the term take my reading of Wordsworth’s formal musicality and sound imagery to a more philosophical level. Rather than simply viewing his auditory poetics as the sounding of words or reading through the lens of metrical appreciation, I explore how Wordsworth carefully crafted his musical language and metaphors as a tool for expressing his theory of the imagination and the function of poetry, as well as his views on life, nature, and humanity.

3) Which of Wordsworth’s poems do you see as being most central to his engagements with music?

In my book, I examined a wide selection of Wordsworth’s lyrical poems, ranging from The Prelude and the ‘Intimations Ode’ to less familiar works like ‘The unremitting voice of nightly streams’ and ‘A Night-Piece’, each musical on its own right. Out of all the poems I considered ‘musical’, I chose to conclude the book with ‘The Solitary Reaper’. This is mainly because of how exquisitely the poem showcases both the simplicity and complexity of Wordsworth’s auditory achievements, celebrating the diversity and multiplicity essential to Wordsworthian musicality and harmony. The poem, I think, is, in itself, a song – a harmony, in poetic terms, between lyric and narrative, definiteness and indefiniteness, presence and absence, sense and imagination, nature and humanity, self and community, loss and consolation. It is one of Wordsworth’s most remarkable poems, exemplifying how the idea of song and music performs a harmony associated with formal aesthetics, aural perception, and sensibility while also functioning as a thematic preoccupation and an imaginative and philosophical influence.

4) Which critics and music theorists did you find it most fruitful to employ in your analysis?

James H. Donelan’s Poetry and the Romantic Musical Aesthetic (2008) was particularly helpful in shaping my auditory apprehension of the confluence between musical aesthetics and Romantic philosophy in Wordsworth’s poetry. His understanding of Wordsworth’s use of metaphors of music as a reflection of his attitude towards poetic form and metrical structure informed my reading of a sense of harmony and musicality associated with Wordsworth’s theory of the imagination, his notions of wise passiveness and organic sensibility, and his conception and practice of lyricism.

My interpretation of the abstract function and mechanism of Wordsworth’s musicality was also influenced by concepts from music psychology, aesthetics, practice, and perception, even though Wordsworth was not personally informed or directly influenced by musical studies. In my chapters on Wordsworth’s associative auditory memory and expectation, I benefited from music psychologist and philosopher Leonard B. Meyer’s theory of musical meaning and emotion, and music psychology and cognition expert David Huron’s theory of expectation. Henri Lefebvre’s theory of rhythmanalysis and John Cage’s theory of audible silence were also helpful to my reading of Wordsworth’s urban rhythm and his poetics of silence. These works provided a framework and relevant vocabulary for me to understand Wordsworth’s metrical art, his writings about the processes of listening, and his representations and descriptions of soundscapes.

5) What new projects are you currently working on?

I am currently editing a collection of essays entitled Romantic Synchronicity: Literary Coincidence and the Poetics of Simultaneity. The volume situates British Romanticism in dialogue with established theories of synchronicity. It sheds light on the significance of the phenomenon of synchronicity in shaping a global and interdisciplinary understanding of Romantic literature and culture. The volume invites academics with different approaches and from different epistemic traditions to reflect on how meaningful coincidences and simultaneity across generic, disciplinary, and national boundaries characterise the Romantic impulse towards creative spontaneity and experimentation. The essays will explore how the acausality and multiplicity of synchronicity account for the presence of uncertainty in the unity and wholeness of the Romantic imagination and in the production of poetic pleasure.

New ready-to-use learning and teaching resources from EEBO, ECCO, and BL 19th-Century Collections

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Historical Texts, which gives digital access to EEBO, ECCO, the UK Medical Heritage Library, and the BL 19th-Century Collections, has launched a new set of resources that you let you bring primary sources directly into your classroom. These are suitable for undergraduate and postgraduate students. You can access the prototype resources via our brand new learning and teaching landing page or the Historical Texts home page.

 

What’s on offer?

  • Free, ready-to-use activities, assessments, and full seminar plans
  • Downloadable, accessible PowerPoint presentations
  • Guidance and ideas for creating innovative assessments, including creative writing
  • “Re-mix” and sample the material for your own purposes (CC-BY-NC)
  • Provides a means to engage students with primary materials and to improve searching skills

Do I have to be a Historical Texts subscriber to access these resources?

No! These resources are free and open access, although some resources do contain links to subscriber-only content.

 

Who created the resources and why?

The inspiration for this project has come from academics within Jisc member institutions. Our Editorial Board of five academics from institutions across the UK has directed the project from the start and created the prototype set of content.

Many of us access EEBO, ECCO, and the other collections on Historical Texts for research purposes—but these resources can help you engage with the material in different ways, making new and more creative uses of the vast, rich range of material available.

 

Want to get involved?—we’d love to have you!

We have created a distribution list for anyone who wants updates on this project as it progresses: please do sign up here to receive update emails and news:https://jisc.onlinesurveys.ac.uk/historical-texts-learning-and-teaching

Or, if you just want to let us know what you think of the resources, you can contact us via the Jisc helpdesk. 

Call for Papers – History Lab Plus 2023 Early-Career Conference: Making History

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Senate House, London

27-28 July 2023

Keynote speaker: Dr Jaipreet Virdi (University of Delaware) 

Extended deadline for proposals: 31 May 2023 

Contact email: MakingHistory2023@gmail.com

History Lab+ is a national network, affiliated with the Institute of Historical Research (IHR), that supports early-career historians working within and outside of academia. History Lab+’s committee works with the IHR, learned societies, academics, and professionals across multiple sectors to provide members with tailored support including training and networking opportunities, resources, and a programme of events showcasing recent historical research and projects. On 27 and 28 July of this year we will be hosting our first annual conference.

Ours is a time of challenges. The value of historical caretaking, research, and teaching is increasingly being measured and questioned. Jobs are scarce and too often fixed-term; never has it been more expensive to pay for accommodation and utilities, even to eat. It is surely time to tackle an urgent, complex question head-on: how, where, and why do humans ‘make’ history?

Proposals might address, but are by no means limited to, histories of

· traditional and non-traditional research and learning spaces: libraries and archives; schools, universities, and homes; museums; minds; virtual realities;

· academic disciplines;

· history and History pedagogies;

· the historiographical canon, what and who it excludes;

· how history has been shared or made public;

· the role of history and historians within societies;

· industrial action in the academic, heritage, and publishing sectors;

· health and history-work;

· history making.

We also welcome proposals relating to any historical research that fits one or more of the following criteria:

· applies atypical methods and/or technologies;

· results from collaboration between job sectors or countries;

· is interdisciplinary;

· has attracted new audiences.

Please send either an individual proposal or a proposal for a panel or roundtable to MakingHistory2023@gmail.com by 23:59 on 31 May 2023. 

Individual proposals should contain: an abstract (250 words), a short biography (100 words), and, in order of preference, how you are able to present your research (in a 20-minute paper, 10-minute paper, 5-minute lightning talk, or a poster).

Panel or roundtable proposals should contain: a description of the panel or roundtable theme and format (250-words) and, for each speaker, an individual abstract (250 words) and a short biography (100 words).

For either proposal type, please also indicate whether and why you would like to be considered for financial support to attend this conference, should funding become available.

If you have any questions at all, don’t hesitate to get in touch with us at the same email address: MakingHistory2023@gmail.com