What Are You Reading?: Kacie Wills
We continue our 'What Are You Reading?' series by presenting an interview with Dr. Kacie Wills. Dr. Wills is a recipient of the K-SAA Pforzheimer Research Grant and recently received her PhD from the University of California, Riverside, on Fancy, Spectacle, and the Materiality of the Romantic Imagination in Pacific Exploration Culture. She will be joining Illinois College as an Assistant Professor of British Literature this August.
What’s the criticalbook that figured most significantly in your PhD thesis/first monograph/mostrecent monograph?
Judith Pascoe’s The Hummingbird Cabinet: a Rare and Curious History of Romantic Collectors figured significantly in my PhD thesis. In addition to providing a model for engaging scholarly writing that I try to emulate, Pascoe’s work was foundational to the ways I think about Romantic collecting and the importance of material culture in shaping the Romantic imagination.
Additionally, Adriana Craciun and Simon Schaffer’s The Material Cultures of Enlightenment Arts and Science helped me to think through the relationship between art and science in Enlightenment and Romantic material cultures and consider how best to engage with material objects in my scholarship. Tim Fulford, Debbie Lee, and Peter J. Kitson’s Literature, Science and Exploration in the Romantic Era: Bodies of Knowledge was fundamental in shaping the trajectory of my thesis, helping me situate a study of material culture within the literature and science of Pacific exploration. All of these works continue to figure significantly in my current book project on the ways that the material culture surrounding Pacific exploration influenced the formation of the Romantic imagination.
What books are inyour 'to read next' pile right now? (poetry, fiction, theory, anything!)
Tita Chico’s The Experimental Imagination, Mary Sheriff’s Enchanted Islands, and Robbie Richardson’s The Savage and Modern Self. I am also re-visiting Beth Lau’s Keats-Shelley Journal essay, “Analyzing Keats’s Library by Genre,” for an article I am working on.
I am looking forward to reading Elizabeth Holmes’s book ofpoetry, Passing Worlds: Tahiti in the Era of Captain Cook, BrendaShaughnessy’s The Octopus Museum, and Annie Nezhukumatathil’s Oceanicfor a class I am developing on poetry and the Pacific.
Esi Edugyan’s Washington Black, which is basically a workof fiction that brings together all of my research interests (thank you to thestaff at Powell’s Books in Portland for that recommendation!).
Finally, Judith Farr’s The Gardens of Emily Dickinson.
What books are onyour night table or desk?
On my night table: A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth, which I have been reading on and off for the past year and which catches me right back into its world every time I pick it up; Patrick DeWitt’s newest novel, French Exit, which I just finished—it is brilliant and hilarious; my old, beaten copy of Keats’s poetry, which contains a decade’s worth of musings in its margins; Manhattan Transfer by Dos Passos because I will never shake my love for the Modernists; and Galileo’s Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, with an introduction by Albert Einstein.
On my desk/dining table: Pacific Performances by Christopher Balme, Miller and Reill’s collection, Visions of Empire, Harriet Guest’s Empire, Barbarism, and Civilisation, Fulford and Hutchings’s Native Americans and Anglo-American Culture, 1750-1850, Byron’s “The Island,” and, shifting to a topic for another project on hot air balloon scrapbooks and Romantic fancy, which I will be doing extensive research for this summer (thanks to the K-SAA Pforzheimer Research Grant!), Sharon Wright’s Balloonomania Belles.
Which bookdo you most frequently recommend to your students? Which students?Why?
I find myself recommending the Selected Letters of John Keats constantly to students interested in the Romantic period, poetry, or writing on the imagination. Keats’s anecdotes, personality, and insights into the workings of the imagination are entertaining, infuriating at times, and fascinating. His letters illustrate what I think is so important for students to see: the writer as a complex person, grappling with real issues. I am always trying to find ways to make the Romantic period come alive for my students, and Keats’s letters do just that. Additionally, because of DH initiatives like the Keats Letters Project, students can see how his letters are impacting current ways of thinking about the Romantic period and poetry and how they continue serve as a source of inspiration that bridges disciplines, time periods, and genres.
Have there been anymainstream articles or publications on the Romantics you'd like to draw ourattention to?
I was so excited to read the recent article in the The Guardian, “Scandal, disgrace, sex: aristocratic secrets laid bare in censored letters,” which discusses the contents of the personal papers of the Granville family, recently purchased by the British Library. The opportunities that will be afforded by these letters for study and for broadening our understanding of women’s lives in the Romantic period are thrilling. As an educator, this is also exactly the sort of material I want to share with students who so often think of the past as somehow “boring” or completely removed from the struggles of the present.
Also, the New York Times piece, “The Secret History of Women in Coding,” which traces the history of women’s work as coders to Ada Lovelace. This article provides a great mainstream example of the ways that the creative and intellectual lives of those in the Romantic period resonate today.
(Photo by Donaldson Collections/Getty Images)