"The Spirit of the Universal Emancipation"
K-SAA is continuing their virtual events series with two talks by Sarah Marsh (Seton Hill University) and Imani Tucker (Yale University). From Mary Shelley's Creature to Uriah D'Arcy's vampire, Romantic-era writers traced the contours and negotiated the boundaries of the human. In doing so, they pushed against the limits of Enlightenment humanism, particularly with regard to questions of freedom and universal rights. During the event, titled "The Spirit of the Universal Emancipation," Marsh and Tucker will examine the role of the more- or less-than human in Romantic-era writing, whether the vampire, the figure of Prometheus, or the cosmos of Benjamin Banneker. How did Banneker's celestial maps produce a science of emancipation? What do mythical, monstrous, or undead figures reveal about the era's concepts of freedom and enslavement? Join us for this fascinating interdisciplinary conversation, chaired by Bakary Diaby (Skidmore College).
"The Spirit of the Universal Emancipation" will take place on March 31, 2025, from 12-1:30 P.M. EST.
You can register via this link.
This event is the third in the virtual events series, following “Percy Shelley’s Sacred Geography” in Fall 2024 (Sarah Copsey-Alsader and Suleiman Ramzi Hodali) and “Everyday Women Who Made Book History” in 2022 (Deborah Hollis and Kirstyn Leuner, moderated by Michelle Levy). We hope you’ll join us in this ongoing conversation about the shifting landscape of Romantic studies.
Sarah Marsh is an Associate Professor of English at Seton Hill University. Her research and teaching are in the long eighteenth century, with focus on the Atlantic literary history of race, slavery, and antislavery.
Imani Tucker is a PhD candidate at Yale University whose work focuses on 19th century British literature, contagious disease, the Black Atlantic, and gender and sexuality. Her dissertation, “Oversights: Supervising the Victorian Governess,” contextualizes the increasingly symptomatic representations of governesses and schoolmistresses in novels of the period within larger discourses about companionate marriage, sentimental education, and the so-called “sex problem” of the nineteenth century.
Bakary Diaby is an Assistant Professor at Skidmore College specializing in Trans-Atlantic Romanticism and Eighteenth-Century Literature. His most recent publications include “Feeling Black, Feeling Back: Race, Fragility, and Romanticism” (Symbiosis, forthcoming), “Our Task After the Wake (Studies in Romanticism, 2022), and “Black Women and/in the Shadow of Romanticism” (European Romantic Review, 2019).
