The Shelley Conference: #Shelley200 Launch

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And we will talk, until thought’s melody 
Become too sweet for utterance, and it die 
In words, to live again in looks, which dart 
With thrilling tone into the voiceless heart, 
Harmonizing silence without a sound.

– Percy Bysshe Shelley, Epipsychidion (1821)

The Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley drowned at sea aged just 29 on the 8th July 1822. The Shelley Conference will mark his bicentenary, celebrating the poet’s life, works, and afterlives on 8-9th July 2022.

In the build-up to the conference, the organisers (Bysshe Inigo Coffey, Amanda Blake Davis, Anna Mercer, and Paul Stephens) are excited to welcome opportunities for scholars and admirers of Shelley and his circle to join public conversations on Shelley’s final years.

In the first of a series of pre-conference events, we are delighted to announce a digital celebration marking the bicentenary of the publication of Epipsychidion in 1821. 

This free roundtable event, to be held on Zoom on 20th May 2021, will invite Shelley scholars to discuss the poem and its critical legacy. The speakers will include Will Bowers, Stuart Curran, Michael Rossington, and Valentina Varinelli. The audience will be invited to participate in a Q&A session, and the event will also be recorded and shared online, welcoming further discussion.

Tickets are available through Eventbrite.

Our call for papers for the 2022 conference will be published following this event (deadline: 1st February 2022). The conference will take place in the UK, and we expect to announce the venue in September 2021.

Following the success of the first ‘Shelley Conference’ in 2017 (organised by Anna Mercer and Harrie Neal), the 2022 conference will again seek to provide a scholarly gathering dedicated to Percy Bysshe Shelley, a poet who remains without an annual event.

We will share #Shelley200 news online throughout the remainder of 2021 and the first half of 2022 (and beyond – as we continue to celebrate Shelley’s legacy). We welcome invitations for networking opportunities with other commemorative events and posts using that hashtag. We are also following with interest and will share and promote the Keats-Shelley Memorial Association’s ongoing #KeatsShelley200 #KS200 celebrations.

Our website will provide a hub for video and text interviews and documentaries from Shelley scholars. The website will not simply be a point of convergence and information for conference delegates, but a valuable and lasting digital resource for Shelley studies.

Get in touch and join the #Shelley200 conversations…Twitter: @ShelleyConf2022
www.theshelleyconference.com
www.facebook.com/shelleyconference   
shelleyconference2022@gmail.com


Project Team:
Dr Bysshe Inigo Coffey (British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow, Newcastle University)
Dr Amanda Blake Davis (University of Sheffield)
Dr Anna Mercer (Cardiff University)
Paul Stephens (University of Oxford)

Advisory Board:
Dr Will Bowers (Queen Mary University of London)
Dr Madeleine Callaghan (University of Sheffield)
Professor Kelvin Everest (University of Liverpool)
Professor Sharon Ruston (Lancaster University)

BARS Digital Events: ‘Romantic Forms’

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This roundtable explores the myriad forms in which Romantic writers wrote, connecting these to the topics and arguments found within texts. It looks at how form impacted on and was knowingly used to express ideologies and politics in texts by Lord Byron, Mary Shelley, Elizabeth Inchbald, Frances Burney, and S.T. Coleridge.

Our speakers will include Amanda Auerbach (Catholic University), Anne-Claire Michoux (University of Zurich), Jack Rooney (Ohio State University), Shellie Audsley (University of Hong Kong), and Rebecca Musk (Lancaster University).

Click here for tickets.

2021 Keats-Shelley Prize

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Our inspiration is John Keats’ epitaph which reads: ‘Here lies one whose name was writ in water.’ This year’s Keats-Shelley Prizes are part of our wider KS200 programme, commemorating the deaths of John Keats on 23rd February 1821 and of PB Shelley on 8th July 1822.

As in previous years, the prize is divided into two competitions.

A Poetry Prize – open to all – on the theme of ‘Writ in Water’.

An Essay Prize – which we hope will be of particular interest to undergraduates and postgraduates with research interests in Romanticism.

Essays may be on any aspect of the works or lives of the Romantics and their circles. They should be no more than 3,000 words including quotations. All sources must be acknowledged.

Total Prize money £5000.

Deadline: 12th April 2021.
Our Prize Judge is the award-winning sports journalist and nature writer, Simon Barnes

Further information is available here.

Email: prizes@keats-shelley.org

You can find podcasts, articles, and playlists inspired by ‘Writ in Water’ here.

The BARS Review, No. 55 (Autumn 2020)

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Map of the celestial sphere (northern hemisphere) showing various zodiacal constellations including Gemini, Leo etc, surrounded by four observatories in Rome, Bologna, Padua and Milan (1790). © The Trustees of the British Museum. Reproduction used under a Creative Commons CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

In spite of the pandemic, the business of Romantic Studies rolls on. We are glad to announce the publication of the most recent issue of The BARS Review (No. 55, Autumn 2020). The issue contains a total of ten reviews of recent scholarly work within the field of Romanticism, broadly conceived. Five of the reviews compromise a ‘spotlight’ section on ‘Romantic Locations, Locating Romanticism’.

The individual reviews are detailed below; as always, all reviews are openly available in html and .pdf through The BARS Review website, and a compilation of all the reviews in the number can be downloaded as a .pdf.

If you have comments on the new number, or on the Review in general, we’d be very grateful for any feedback that would allow us to improve the site or its content. Mark Sandy would also be very happy to hear from people who would like to review for BARS.

Editor: Mark Sandy (Durham University)
General Editors: Ian Haywood (University of Roehampton) and Anthony Mandal (Cardiff University)
Technical Editor: Matthew Sangster (University of Glasgow)

Reviews

1) Stephen Bygrave on Julia Straub, The Rise of New Media, 1750-1850: Transatlantic Discourse and American Memory. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.
2) Jonathon Shears on Clara Tuite, ed., Byron in Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019.
3) Frederick Burwick on Angela Esterhammer, Print and Performance in the 1820s: Improvisation, Speculation, Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020.
4) Gerald Egan on Kenneth McNeil, Scottish Romanticism and Collective Memory in the British Atlantic. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020.
5) Anne-Claire Michoux on Claire Connolly, ed., Irish Literature in Transition, 1780-1830. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020.

Spotlight: Romantic Locations, Locating Romanticism

6) Nigel Leask on Simon Bainbridge, Mountaineering and British Romanticism: The Literary Cultures of Climbing, 1770-1836. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020.
7) Susanne Schmid on Will Bowers, The Italian Idea: Anglo-Italian Radical Literary Culture, 1815-1823. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020.
8) David Duff on Sophie Laniel-Musitelli and Thomas Constantinesco, eds., Romanticism and Philosophy: Thinking with Literature. New York and London: Routledge, 2019.
9) Chris Townsend on Richard Marggraf Turley, ed., Keats’s Places. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.
10) Daniel Norman on Nicholas Mason and Tom Mole, eds., Romantic Periodicals in the Twenty-First Century: Eleven Case Studies from Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020

CFP: Wordsworth-Coleridge Association at MLA 2022

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Modern Language Association Convention, Washington DC, January 6-9, 2022

The Wordsworth-Coleridge Association is an Allied Organization of the Modern Language Association that meets annually during the MLA Convention. Along with an annual festive lunch, the Wordsworth-Coleridge Association is allowed to propose up to two scholarly sessions. For the MLA Convention in Washington DC, proposals are invited on the following topic: Romanticism and Data.

What was “data” — and what were data — in the Romantic era? According to the OED, a “datum” is “an item of (chiefly numerical) information, esp. one obtained by scientific work,” and “something given or granted; something known or assumed as fact, and made the basis of reasoning,” both senses being in use during the period. This call is open to: different kinds of data (e.g., bibliographic, colonial, demographic, fiscal, historical, industrial, literary, personal, scientific, sensory, slave trade); techniques, media, forms, and formats of datafication; data collection projects from the period, big and small; critiques of data and dataveillance; Romantic epistemologies, epistemological hierarchies, facts, truth, and negative capabilities; documentalities, informational genres, information management, and categorizations; computational approaches (paper or electronic) to Romantic-era texts or Romantic studies over the years. Papers that explore the relationship between literature and data are especially welcome.

Please submit abstracts (maximum 300 words) by March 15, 2021, to James McKusick (mckusickj@umkc.edu). The MLA requires (in addition to an abstract) a brief biographical statement (circa 300 words), written in the third person, including the presenter’s name, title, affiliation, final degree institution and date, scholarly interests and publications. Particularly relevant are scholarship and publications that directly relate to the proposed session topic. Please include some persuasive points about the importance, significance, and contribution of the proposed presentation and any previous work you have done relating to the session topic.

All MLA program participants must be members of the Modern Language Association by April 1, 2021. For information on the MLA Convention here.

All subscribers to The Wordsworth Circle are members of the Wordsworth-Coleridge Association. Essays selected for presentation at MLA will be considered for publication in The Wordsworth Circle. Please address any questions regarding the Wordsworth-Coleridge Association to the President of the Association:

Dean James McKusick                         Email: mckusickj@umkc.edu
Honors College
University of Missouri-Kansas City
5030 Cherry Street
Kansas City, MO 64110

Job Advertisement: Senior Lecturer in English Literature, Lund University

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Lund University was founded in 1666 and is repeatedly ranked among the world’s top 100 universities. The University has 40 000 students and more than 8 000 staff based in Lund, Helsingborg and Malmö. We are united in our efforts to understand, explain and improve our world and the human condition.

The Joint Faculties of the Humanities and Theology have eight departments and carries out large and varied work within research and education with the purpose to understand people as cultural and social beings. The faculties have some 700 employees and around 4000 students.

The Centre for Languages and Literature at Lund University (SOL) is Sweden’s largest university department for languages, linguistics, literature and area studies. SOL provides a wide range of freestanding courses complemented with an increasing number of first and second cycle degree programmes. Housing 33 subjects and roughly the same number of PhD programmes, SOL is a solid foundation for broad and deep education and research, characterised by national and international visibility. SOL is managed by a board chaired by the Head of Department. The management also includes two assistant heads of department with special areas of responsibility. More than 250 people are employed and around 3 000 students, including around 100 PhD students, conduct their studies at SOL.

Read more & apply click here

Hannah More and Material Culture: Call for Papers

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A Digital Conference, 24-5 June 2021

Hannah More, one of the most prominent intellectual figures of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, left multiple material traces of her work and activities. From the buildings that housed her Sunday Schools across the Mendips, to the 1,800 surviving letters written by her in her lifetime, to the thousands of inscriptions and autographs written by her in fans’ books, to the copious knitting she produced for friends and loved ones, to the boards holding her poetry in country estates in the south west, a wealth of material evidence has survived. Little has been examined, however, or enjoyed the sort of sustained and serious investigation increasingly offered to material cultures of the eighteenth century by critics including Chloe Wigston Smith, Jennie Batchelor, Maddie Pelling, Freya Gowrley, Elizabeth Eger, Nicole Pohl, Amanda Vickery and others.

This conference, which will be held using digital technologies and platforms, seeks to address this significant gap in More scholarship and it looks to do so by taking advantage of the benefits offered by digital conferencing over face-to-face events. Therefore, contributors are explicitly invited to consider the ways in which they might make use of digital technology to make more visible, or more accessible, or more readable, the material traces left by Hannah More.

Proposals of around 250 words for presentations are invited. The deadline for submission of proposals is 9 April 2021. Submissions should include a title, affiliation if applicable, and a short (100 word) biography. If you are proposing a roundtable please include proposals and supplementary information for all participants.

As a result of our invitation to utilise digital technology to enhance your presentation, we are open to a range of formats including, but not limited to, the following:

•       Virtual tours of repositories, collections or libraries
•       Show and tell
•       Digital manipulation of objects
•       Digital explorations of buildings, blueprints, maps
•       Academic papers with a strong visual element
•       Roundtable discussions with a strong visual element
•       Recreation of objects using digital technologies
•       Theatre
•       Performance

These formats can be on a range of topics including, but not limited to, the following:

•       Hannah More’s letters
•       Textiles
•       Material culture and friendship
•       Object circulation
•       Collection, then and now
•       Barley Wood, its construction, history, use
•       Gardening
•       Botanizing
•       Gifting
•       Autograph hunting
•       Hannah More’s library
•       Sociability
•       Knitting and sewing
•       Material culture and gender
•       Hannah More’s Sunday Schools
•       Philanthropy
•       Inscription poetry
•       The Belmont estate
•       Hannah More’s Pedagogy
•       Museum curation, displays and/or public engagement with objects
•       Preservation and conservation of material objects
•       Buildings
•       Music
•       Church and/or Mendips churches


Please send your proposals to the following address: sue.edney@bristol.ac.uk clearly marked ‘Hannah More and Material Culture’.

There will be no formal conference fee, but participants will be invited to make a donation to The Hannah More Trust, a charity dedicated to promoting knowledge about More’s life and works.

Davy Notebooks Project: Postdoctoral Research Associate Roles

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The Department of English Literature and Creative Writing is seeking to appoint a Research Associate on a full-time basis to work on the AHRC-funded Davy Notebooks Project.

You will assist the Project’s Principal Investigator (PI), Professor Sharon Ruston, and the Senior Research Associate, Dr Andrew Lacey, to work on the transcription and annotation of Humphry Davy’s notebooks using the crowdsourcing platform Zooniverse (https://www.zooniverse.org/). The final transcriptions will be published on the Lancaster Digital Library. You will also participate in the generation of new knowledge from these materials, via journal articles, public outreach activities, and conference presentations. 

You will have a PhD in Literature or History concentrating on the eighteenth and/or nineteenth centuries. Direct experience with eighteenth- and/or nineteenth-century manuscripts is desirable, as are publications on or in a field related to eighteenth- and/or nineteenth-century literature and/or science. Previous editorial experience, particularly previous work on a scholarly edition, would be an advantage as would previous experience on a Digital Humanities project especially one that has applied TEI (Text Encoding Initative) Guidelines. While experience with TEI would be an advantage, full training will be given in the role. There is a specific focus on contexts of slavery and colonialism in one part of the project, as well as more general links to the fields of literature and science and the history of science in the whole project. You will use social media to promote the project and find new audiences for the transcriptions. 

This is an excellent opportunity for an early career researcher to receive training and gain experience in scholarly editing, digital humanities methods, project management, impact and public engagement activities, research networking opportunities, and research mentoring which may lead to joint and sole-authored publication. 

You will join us on an indefinite contract however, the role remains contingent on external funding which, at this time is for 23 months.

For more details and to apply, click here. Applications close 15 March 2021.

Keats200

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Since December 2018, Keats House, Hampstead has been celebrating the life and works of Keats through the Keats200 bicentenary programme. Although the house remains closed to the public at present, the Keats200 exhibition is accessible online (here), with the final content looking at Keats’s ‘Death and Legacy’ (here).

Thank you to everyone who has helped us deliver #Keats200 and followed its progress online.