The BARS Executive
BARS is administered by an Executive Committee whose roles are described in the Association's Constitution. The current executive was elected at the 2022 conference at Edge Hill University and in a special online election in early 2023. Its members will serve two-year terms under ordinary circumstances.
Officers
President: Matthew Sangster (University of Glasgow)
Matt is Professor of Romantic Studies, Fantasy and Cultural History at the University of Glasgow. He was elected as BARS President in 2024. He previously served on the Executive in a number of different roles, joining as postgraduate representive in 2009. His initiatives as Website Editor include the creation of the Blog and the online BARS Review, the 'Five Questions' interview series with academics about recent books and research projects and the continuing development of the site. He was conference chair for the 2021 and 2024 BARS International Conferences.
Vice President: Jennifer Orr (Newcastle University)
Jennifer is Senior Lecturer in Eighteenth Century Literature at Newcastle University. She served as Secretary 2018-2023 before being elected to the role of Vice President of BARS. Her current research is compiling a Digital Humanities project, Transatlantic Networks, which includes a digital edition of correspondence that will eventually comprise a who’s who of early nineteenth century transatlantic intellectual networks. The pilot can be viewed here. In her home institution she is a University Educational Practice Mentor, which informs her interests in developing mentoring and networking opportunities.
Secretary: Andrew McInnes (Edge Hill University)
Andrew McInnes is Reader in Romanticisms at Edge Hill University where he is also Co-Director of EHU Nineteen, Edge Hill’s Research Centre in Nineteenth-Century Studies. Before taking on the role of Secretary, he was lead organiser of New Romanticisms, the joint BARS/NASSR conference 2022. As Secretary, he works with the President and Vice-President on the running of meetings, including the Biennial General Meeting held at BARS conferences, and liaises between the Executive and BARS membership on queries and subvention requests.
Treasurer: Mary Fairclough (York University)
Mary is Professor of Eighteenth-Century and Romantic Period Literature at the University of York, and member of the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies. She was co-organiser of the BARS Conference in 2017: Romantic Improvement. As Treasurer, she oversees the finances of BARS and works with the Bursaries Officer to coordinate BARS bursaries and awards.
Membership Secretary: Yimon Lo (University of Tübingen/University of Leuven)
Yimon is Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Tübingen and Research Fellow at the University of Leuven. She joined the Executive as Membership Secretary in March 2023, and is responsible for progressing BARS membership applications and managing membership records. She is Reader of the 2023 BARS First Book Prize, and has previously served as Editorial Assistant for The BARS Review.
Past President: Anthony Mandal (Cardiff University)
After serving as a co-opted member of the Executive since 2013, Anthony Mandal was elected Vice President of BARS in 2015 and President of BARS in 2019. As Vice-President, he sat on the award committee of the second BARS First Book Prize; reviewed applications for the BARS and Marilyn Butler Fellowships at Chawton House Library; arranged the preparation of the BARS postcards; and developed BARS funding awards with the Executive.
Members
Editor of The BARS Review: Irene Valenti (University of Augsburg)
Irene is a PhD candidate and assistant lecturer at the University of Augsburg. Her dissertation project revisits the theories of the sublime from a new materialist perspective. She is also interested in daemons, manuscripts, and (body) horror. She is editorial assistant of ANGLIA/Journal of English Philology and Editor of The BARS Review, for which she commissions reviews of recent books in the field of Romantic studies.
Communications Officer: Amy Wilcockson (Queen Mary University of London)
As Communications Officer, Amy edits the BARS Blog and runs the BARS mailbase, alongside overseeing the Associations’ social media presence. Amy is Lecturer in English at Queen Mary University of London.
Bursaries Officer: Gerard Lee McKeever (University of Edinburgh)
Gerry is Lecturer in Scottish Literature at the University of Edinburgh. He was elected to the executive in March 2023 and is responsible for BARS bursary schemes including the Stephen Copley Awards. Gerry’s current research projects include a book on regional Romanticism; large-scale studies of library borrowing records; and an edition of John Galt’s autobiographies
Digital Events Officer: Roslyn Joy Irving (Johannes-Gutenberg-Universität Mainz)
Roslyn Joy Irving is a researcher and lecturer at the University of Mainz. Her research interests include eighteenth-century poetry and prose, the Gothic, form, and prospect (the view from a height). Her publications can be found in Volupté, ANQ, Archiv, the Nordic Journal of English Studies, and the Routledge Introduction to Poetic Forms. She is co-editor, with Patrick Gill, of The Laureates: Poetry and Public Office (1668-2029) (forthcoming 2026), with Liverpool University Press, and with Rachael Sumner, of a Routledge volume, Transnational Postcolonial Studies in the Twenty-First Century: Infrastructures, Literatures, Applications (2026). Her monograph, Ann Radcliffe’s Gothic Method is under contract with Edinburgh University Press (forthcoming 2027).
Website Officer: Jason Whittaker (University of Lincoln)
Jason is Professor of Communications at the University of Lincoln, alternating between interests in digital communications and William Blake. He is the author of a number of books on Blake, and is a trustee of The Blake Society, as well as Secretary/Director of Digital Strategy for The Global Blake Network.
Early Career Officer: Laura Brook
Laura Brook recently graduated with 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.
Early Career Officer: Serena Qihui Pei
Serena Qihui Pei holds a PhD in English and Comparative Literature from University College London (UCL). Her research explores the intersections of British Romanticism, Chinese philosophy, Sino-British cultural encounters in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the environmental humanities. Her peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, and 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). She is an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (AFHEA) and was recently elected an Associate Fellow of the Royal Historical Society (RHS).
Postgraduate Officer: Emma Butler (Edge Hill University)
Emma is a PhD researcher in English Literature at Edge Hill University. Her thesis studies portrayals of the coast as a liminal space in nineteenth-century literature through health/sickness, the working class, and the Gothic. Emma’s research interests span the long nineteenth century, with a focus on the novels of Jane Austen. She is a keen menstrual health advocate, which has merged into an academic interest in disability studies and the medical humanities. Emma was also the 2025 BARS Visiting Fellow at Chawton House.
2026-27 Communications Fellow: Yuan Ge (King's College London)
Yuan Ge recently passed her PhD viva at King’s College London, where she is working as a teaching assistant. Her doctoral research takes a phenomenological approach to study how the perception of rhythms in Percy Shelley’s writing evolved throughout his career, and the way in which Shelley’s rhythmic model exposes the tension between different scales of personal, political, and scientific time in the Romantic period. She has published an article in the Keats-Shelley Journal and a book review in The Keats-Shelley Review. Yuan also has research interests in literature for children in the Romantic period, and she is currently working on an essay on Anna Barbauld’s pedagogy for Mary Fairclough and Joanna Wharton’s edited collection Anna Laetitia Barbauld: Voicing Dissent. She is curating the series On the Bookshelf for the BARS Blog.
Co-Opted Positions
As well as its elected members, the Executive include a number of co-opted specialists who bring particular expertise to the association. The co-opted members are:
Outreach and Impact: Jeff Cowton (Wordsworth Trust)
Jeff is responsible for the Wordsworth Trust Fellowship and for developing liaisons with similar partners.
Non-Academic Officer: Emily Paterson-Morgan
Emily Paterson-Morgan is currently based in Dubai (UAE) where she works as Head of Research Development and Dissemination for Knowledge E, and Director of Operations for the Forum for Open Research in MENA. In addition, as an independent scholar and the Director of The Byron Society, she sits on the Editorial Boards of a leading literature journal and a university press, and organises the annual Newstead Abbey Byron Conference.
Research and Innovation Officer: Carmen Casaliggi (Cardiff Metropolitan University)
Carmen is a Reader in English at Cardiff Metropolitan University. Her research interests are in British and European Romanticism, Romantic-period sociability culture, Romanticism’s legacies, and the environmental humanities. She joined the Executive as co-opted Research and Innovation Officer in March 2023.
BARS First Book Prize Chair 2028: TBA
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