Romantic Insurrections/Counter-Insurrections: Reflections on NASSR 2024
By Isabel Realyvasquez (Columbia University) and Tammuz Frankel (Princeton University)
In August of 2024, the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism (NASSR) held its annual conference at Georgetown University. The two of us, each having just completed our first year in our respective doctoral programs, attended for the first time. We both were moved by the welcoming, collegial, and invigorating atmosphere of the entire conference.
We especially appreciated how capaciously this year’s NASSR took up ‘Romanticism,’ bringing together conference attendees from a wide range of disciplines both within and beyond literary and eighteenth/nineteenth-century studies. The conference’s theme on “Romantic Insurrections/Counter-Insurrections” could not have felt timelier, invoking contemporary politics as well as the intimate and complex relationship Romanticism holds to revolution, associated at once with radical upheavals and bourgeois individualism. This year, the conference was convened for the first time by the Bigger 6 Collective, an organization founded in 2017 dedicated “to challenging structural racism in the academic study of Romanticism.” Participants were invited to consider how to draw from the radicalism of the Romantic archives, as well as to expand Romanticism’s spatial and temporal boundaries. We were inspired by how panels linked research within the field to broader social movements.
Both of us had the opportunity to present our own work on panels. Isabel examined the kinetic atmosphere in William Gilbert’s The Hurricane as a force of anti-colonial rebellion; Tammuz presented a paper on the revolutionary ‘work’ of exhaustion in John Keats’s “Ode on Indolence.” We were so pleased that so many scholars we have long admired attended our panels and responded to our work as peers. The support was incredible.
We would be remiss not to mention this year’s three brilliant keynote speeches. On the first day, Padma Rangarajan presented a talk on the fluid and elusive legacies of speech and insurrection from the Romantic period, focusing on the cultural afterlives of the Irish orator Robert Emmet and the Indian Polygar Verapandiya Katabomman. Rangarajan emphasized the epistemological importance of orality to Romanticism and Romantic scholarship, how a politics of muteness and silence has shaped the reception of these two figures. The second day brought Saree Makdisi, who delivered a lecture entitled “Romanticism and Primitive Accumulation.” Building on his 2014 book Making England Western: Occidentalism, Race, and Imperial Culture, Makdisi argued against a dominant critical tendency that sequesters histories of capitalism to the urban metropolis and histories of imperialism to its ‘peripheries,’ calling for a radical rethinking of the relationship between Romanticism and narratives of modernization and Westernization. On day three, Grégory Pierrot introduced us to the fascinating history of Marie Antoine Nicolas Alexandre Robert Jachin de Sainte Rose Roume de Saint Laurent, a white-passing Freemason whose influence spanned France, the Caribbean, and the United States. Pierrot traced this enigmatic figure’s movements through the transatlantic networks of Scottish Freemasonry, illuminating its surprising role in Haiti as both a rejection of European hegemony and complex site of racial solidarity and disavowal.
We were lucky to attend many other panels over the duration of the conference. There were far too many outstanding papers and panels to mention here: on Romantic-era botany and contemporary visual art, on reading Wordsworth alongside Robespierre, on juxtaposing Frankenstein with plantation tourism, and so forth. We were also able to participate in the Race and Empire Studies Caucus, where we met in small groups to discuss potential panel topics and keynote lectures for future conferences. Our group was warm and receptive, keen to hear about our experiences and perspectives as first time conference-goers.
The conference ended on a high note. On the final day, participants gathered for ‘NASSR Performs!’—renewing a tradition that had been on pause for the past five years. An otherwise unassuming staircase outside a lecture hall in Georgetown was transformed into a stage to showcase the exceptional talents of conference attendees. The event featured sensational performances by NASSR participants of various works, including an excerpt from Blake’s Visions of the Daughters of Albion, Wordsworth’s “I Wandered as Lonely as a Cloud,” and Thomas Spence’s “The Rights of Infants.” At the very end, all those in attendance came together for a spirited and rousing sing-along of “The Devil’s Garland,” providing a perfect conclusion to four days of warmth, camaraderie, and intellectual engagement. We cannot wait for NASSR 2025!
About the Authors
Isabel Realyvasquez is a PhD student in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where she specializes in eighteenth-century and Romantic British poetry. Through an ecocritical lens, her research explores human-nonhuman entanglements in the transatlantic colonial imaginary. She holds a BA in English from UC Davis and an MPhil in Eighteenth-Century and Romantic Studies from the University of Cambridge.
Tammuz Frankel is a PhD student in English at Princeton University, where he serves as co-chair of the Eighteenth-Century and Romanticism Colloquium. His research focuses on global Romanticism (and its twentieth-century afterlives), affect theory, and poetics. He is currently at work on a genealogy of ‘exhaustion’ from the post-Enlightenment to the present. Tammuz also holds a BA with Honors from Brown University.