Listed below are calls for panel contributions for the 2026 Conference (updated 18/11/25). If you would like to send out a similar call for contributions, please write to the conference organisers at: bars2026@contacts.bham.ac.uk
Letitia Elizabeth Landon and the Poetics of Retrospection, BARS Birmingham 2026
Convenor: Emily Rohrbach, University of Durham
This in-person session invites proposals for papers addressing the conference topic of retrospection in the poetry and/or prose writing of Letitia Elizabeth Landon. Themes of personal and/or historical pasts, loss, grief, regret, forgetting; the pleasures and/or pains of memory; subjectivity and the processes of retrospection and anticipation; comparisons between Landon and other Romantics vis-à-vis retrospection; Landon’s relations to authors from previous generations (e.g. the eighteenth century, the Classical world).
Please send a proposal of 250 words and a very brief bio by the end of November 2025 to emily.rohrbach@durham.ac.uk. Informal inquiries prior to this deadline are also welcome.
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Repetitions and Innovations in Late German Romanticism
Convenor: Joanna Neilly, St. Peter’s, Oxford
In the final poem of Heinrich Heine’s ‘Lyrical Intermezzo’ (1827) the poet asks for a coffin in which to bury the old songs of German Romanticism that inspired youthful dreams, which in turn occasioned adult disappointment. In an irony typical of Heine, this desire to kill off songs is placed within the wider project of his own Book of Songs. And having called for the death of the Romantic song, twenty years later Heine claims to have written ‘perhaps the last free woodland song of Romanticism’ (veilleicht das letzte / Freie Waldlied der Romantik) in his mock epic Atta Troll (1847). In this panel, papers will address how the writers of Spätromantik (German Late Romanticism) overcame the tenacious hold of seemingly worn-out Romantic forms, tropes, and motifs, repurposing them for innovative political, cultural, or aesthetic critique. The folk song; the overdetermined Gothic plot; figures such as the wanderer, the postilion, the beautiful muse; Romantic transcendence itself; are all, by the late 1810s onwards, at risk of becoming mere ciphers for a highly commercialised literary mood. This panel will investigate how and why writers who came belatedly to the Romantic scene, born too late to be among the earliest innovators of the Jena circle, nonetheless found ways of reinventing Romanticism, even if paradoxically through repetition.
Please send a proposal of 250 words and a very brief bio by the end of November 2025 to joanna.neilly@mod-langs.ox.ac.uk. Informal inquiries prior to this deadline are also welcome.
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Creative-Critical Writing and Romantic Studies
Convenor: Adam Neikirk
This session would consider, broadly, the role and status of creative-critical writing in Romantic studies. “Creative-critical” refers to a range of writing practices that center on a literary text or texts: defined by Peter Wilson as “creative writing not in response to text, creative writing in response to text, critical-creative re-writing, critical writing in response to text, critical writing not in response to text” (“Creative writing and critical response” 440). Such writing can take on many forms—almost infinitely many—but for that reason, perhaps, its place in the ever-shifting landscape of Romantic studies might be more obscure than the thoroughgoing article or monograph, even if it has “profound pedagogical payoffs” for in the teaching of Romantic works (Rachel Feder, “Zonkey Romanticism”).
This session therefore invites both artists and scholars to consider submitting both creative-critical pieces, written in response to Romantic literary texts or other Romantic works, as well as papers that consider the role of such writing in Romantic studies from a meta-disciplinary perspective. Of course, cross-pollination is welcome. Possible subthemes include but are not limited to:
- Creative-critical writing as a pedagogical or liberational tool;
- Versification of Romantic prose; & “prosifying” Romantic verse;
- The use of history/biography/time/space in creative writing;
- Romantic literature as therapy/creative response as therapy;
- Contemporary creative-critical responses to Romanticism;
- Romantic creative-critical responses to contemporaneity;
- Romanticism, creative-critical writing, and parasocial relationships;
- Creative-critical writing and Romantic literary coteries;
- Creative-critical writing and Romantic cultures.
Please send a proposal of 250 words and a very brief bio by the end of November 2025 to adamneikirk@gmail.com. Informal inquiries prior to this deadline are also welcome.
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Writing History in the Romantic Era
Convenor: Flávia Varella, Federal University of Sata Catarina, Brazil
This in-person session seeks to bring together scholars interested in how history was written, imagined, and theorized during the Romantic era. The session focuses on historians and historiographical works, inviting contributions that explore the conceptual, methodological, and institutional dimensions of Romantic historiography, its intellectual networks, and its audiences.
We welcome analyses of both canonical and lesser-known historians, as well as studies addressing transnational dialogues, formal innovations, responses to eighteenth-century ideas, and engagements with the classical tradition, among other possible approaches. The session also encourages papers examining historical works aimed at adult or juvenile audiences, including those situated at the intersection between historiography and the history of education.
Please send a proposal of 250 words and a very brief bio by the end of November 2025 to flavia_varella@hotmail.com. Informal inquiries prior to this deadline are also welcome.
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Romantic Orientalism in Writing and Art
Convenor: Reyam Rammahi (Oxford)
Orientalism was inseparable from the Romantic movement, and orientalist depictions of the fantastical East (largely defined) prevailed in poetry, prose, music, and paintings. The abundance of orientalist works inspired authors in various ways, quite often provoking competitiveness among authors and artists as to which work would stand as having the most “authentic” or “realistic” East in it. Authors claimed to have been to the East, read authentic works about it, and had the best “translation” of it.
This panel welcomes papers that discuss any aspect of Romantic Orientalism, but especially encourages analyses of artworks and literary works, the relationship between the two, or event separate literary or art works. Panelists are encouraged to provide slides with the artworks they aim to discuss during the panel.
Please send a proposal of 250 words and a very brief bio by the end of November 2025 to reyam.rammahi@gmail.com. Informal inquiries prior to this deadline are also welcome.
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Arab and Islamic Worlds in Sir William Jones’s Works and their Influence on Romantic Thought
Convenor: Reyam Rammahi (Oxford)
On 1 December 1782, philologist Sir William Jones published his translation of the famous Arab poems “Moallakat”. This was the first time these poems appeared in English. The original poems, reputed to have been transcribed in gold and suspended from the Kaaba at Mecca, were already greatly acclaimed in the Arab world, and considered among the finest works of pre-Islamic poetical genius. Hence, these poems attracted the attention of Jones, an intellectual and scholar who appreciated the poems’ beauty and pastoral aspects, among other characteristics. The influence of Jones’s translation of the poems can be traced in numerous works by different authors of his own time as well as later periods, including those by Robert Southey and Lord Byron. Certainly, part of the appeal of these poems was their pastoral settings, reflecting the Bedouin life in Arabia, settings much praised and admired by Jones himself, at least in his Essay on the Poetry of the Eastern Nations (1772). But Jones’s legacy and impact on Romanticism extends beyond the Moallakat.
Please send a proposal of 250 words and a very brief bio by the end of November 2025 to reyam.rammahi@gmail.com. Informal inquiries prior to this deadline are also welcome.
