For February’s What Are You Reading?, we spoke to Merrilees Roberts, an Independent Scholar based near London. Her work encompasses Romanticism, philosophy, psychology, poetics and literary theory, with a particular focus on Percy Bysshe Shelley, who was the subject of her doctoral thesis. She has recently published work on Prometheus Unbound in the Keats-Shelley Review, on Shelley’s prefaces in Romanticism, and a book chapter on Shame, affect and The Cenci in Affect Theory and Literary Critical Practice: A Feel for the Text (Palgrave, 2019). Her first monograph, Shelley’s Poetics of Reticence: Shelley’s Shame, was published by Routledge in April 2020. This work explores the affective, rhetorical and phenomenological links between shame and reticence, and sheds new light on the psychology of Shelley’s anguished poet-Subject. What new studies of Romantic literature are you reading right now? I am slowing exploring The Testimony of Sense: Empiricism and the Essay
For December’s What Are You Reading?, we were privileged to interview Dr Charlotte May. Dr May is currently a Cultural Engagement Fellow on an AHRC-funded project about Robert Southey’s Keswick (PI: Professor Lynda Pratt). This project is in conjunction with Keswick Museum to promote its important and under-used collections relating to the controversial nineteenth century Poet Laureate and historian Robert Southey (1774-1843). What’s your favourite part of working on your current project? My career has very much focused on the public engagement front of academia, although I have also held various teaching posts. As a literary historian, I have always worked with archives and museums, and it really is such a privilege to do so, especially as the heritage sector has had a particularly challenging year. What are you working on at the moment, and which writing informs your ongoing research? My PhD was an edition of the selected letters of Samuel Rogers, and I am working on art
This month we had the honor of speaking to Jonathan Gonzalez, a final-year PhD candidate at the University of La Rioja. His dissertation, Writing to Last: Wordsworth’s Poetics of Immortality and the Cult of Romantic Genius, considers the Romantic cult of posterity, the construction of a textual life-after-death, and Wordsworth’s poetics of immortality. His broader research interests include nineteenth-century reading practices, the relationship between poetry and place, as well as Romantic-era walking and perceptions of landscape. He has written on Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey, and his first book, a critical edition of the latter’s Letters Written During a Short Residence in Spain and Portugal, will be published by Routledge in 2021. What new studies of Romantic literature are you reading right now? I try to maintain interests in and keep up to date with new writing in the field—whether it is right up my street or not. Over the past few months Tom Duggett’s critical edition of So
It’s time for a ‘What Are You Reading’ interview, this time with PhD candidate, Chris Kelleher. Chris studies at the University of Toronto, is Chancellor Jackman Junior Fellow at the Jackman Humanities Institute, and a former fellow of Massey College at the University of Toronto. Completed as part of the “Second Cities in the Circuits of Empire” research project based in the University of Glasgow and funded by the British Academy, Chris’ work examines the history of imperial circulation during the Romantic period, as well as the emergence of cosmopolitan culture within the modern global credit economy. He has published an essay in English Language Notes and recently had another essay accepted for publication in Studies in English Literature, entitled “Oriental Debts and Occidental Avatars in Robert Southey’s The Curse of Kehama.” Chris has also written for University Affairs Magazine and the NASSR Grad Student Blog. You can read our other ‘What Are You Reading?’ inter
The K-SAA is grateful to all the excellent contributors to the ‘What Are You Reading?’ series on the Blog so far! We hope you are enjoying these interviews. Today, we present a special Q&A with Kate Singer (Associate Professor of English at Mount Holyoke College and K-SAA Secretary) to mark the publication of her monograph Romantic Vacancy: The Poetics of Gender, Affect, and Radical Speculation. Described by critics as a ‘formidable text for our time’, Romantic Vacancy argues that, at the cult of sensibility’s height, Romantic writers found alternative tropes of affect to express movement beyond sensation and the body. Readers of the text will learn about the deep history of how poetic language can help us move beyond binary gender and its limiting intellectual and affective ideologies. You can read our other ‘What Are You Reading?’ special interview here, and see all the posts in the series here. Perhaps you have a new publication in Romantic studies that you’d l
We hope you have enjoyed the various interviews presented in the K-SAA’s ‘What Are You Reading?’ series so far. Today we are delighted to continue the series with a fascinating response from Deborah Lam. Deborah is a PhD researcher and Associate Tutor at the University of Bristol, and she explains her current project: My thesis attempts to define an aesthetics of excess in the work of Keats and the Pre-Raphaelite Circle, and explores forms of copiousness from poetry to visual art. Currently, I am convening the Poetry module for the English Literature and Community Engagement BA. Before coming to Bristol, I read English and Related Literature at the University of York, and then for an MPhil in Eighteenth-Century and Romantic Literature at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, during which my dissertation examined visions, optical phenomena and phenomenology in Coleridge’s writing. In these posts we hope to support and encourage discussions relating to the latest Romantic-
Professor Nicola Watson on The Author’s Effects: On Writer’s House Museums We’ve been delighted to have so many excellent contributors to our ‘What Are You Reading?’ series on the K-SAA Blog. Today, we present a special Q&A – an interview with Nicola Watson of the Open University to mark the publication of her monograph The Author’s Effects: On Writer’s House Museums (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020). Nicola Watson is a specialist in the literature and culture of the Romantic period. Her research focuses on authorial afterlives and the associated histories of literary tourism, literary commemoration, and the literary museum. She is the PI of the AHRC-funded project DREAMing Romantic Europe. Her latest publication, The Author’s Effects, is the only book about the emergence of the writer’s house museum in the Romantic period as a distinct cultural formation and convention. It considers the writer’s house museum as a form of literary biography crucial to the construc
We’re excited to continue our “What are you reading?” series by presenting an interview with Chris Washington, Assistant Professor of English at Francis Marion University. His first monograph, Romantic Revelations: Visions of Post-Apocalyptic Hope and Life in the Anthropocene, was published by the University of Toronto Press in September 2019. With Anne McCarthy he is co-editor of the collection Romanticism and Speculative Realism (Bloomsbury, 2019). He has published essays in Romantic Circles Praxis, Essays in Romanticism, European Romantic Review, Romantic Circles Pedagogy Commons, Literature Compass, and has several more forthcoming in journals and collections. He is also the editor of the forthcoming volume of essays, “Teaching Romanticism in the Anthropocene,” for Romantic Circles Pedagogy Commons. He is currently working on two monographs, “#OccupyRomanticism: Revolutionary Climate Protest from Then to Now,” and “Quantum Romanticism: Life, Love, and Politics in
Leading on from our interview with Graham Henderson last week, we’re continuing our ‘What Are You Reading?’ series with an interview with John Worthen – the author of Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Critical Biography (2019), which was one of the texts that Graham was reading! John Worthen taught at Downing College, Cambridge; University of Kent; and University College of Swansea before becoming Professor of D. H. Lawrence Studies at the University of Nottingham. He has written prolifically on Romantic and Modernist writers. Some of his monographs include The Gang: Coleridge, the Hutchinsons & the Wordsworths in 1802 (2001); D. H. Lawrence: The Life of an Outsider (2005); Robert Schumann: Life and Death of a Musician (2007); T. S. Eliot: A Short Biography (2009); An Introduction to Samuel Taylor Coleridge (2013); William Wordsworth: A Critical Biography (2014); and, most recently, a fantastic (and highly recommended) seminal work entitled Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Cri
We are delighted to continue our ‘What are you reading?’ series by presenting an interview with Graham Henderson. Graham is the President and CEO of Music Canada, and the creator of ‘The Real Percy Bysshe Shelley’, a website devoted to celebrating Shelley’s life and works, especially his radical writings and ideas; as the mission statement suggests, Graham’s work promotes the fact that “Shelley has the power to enthrall, thrill and inspire. His poetry changed the world and can do so again“. Graham is on the Board of the Keats-Shelley Association of America. You can find him on Twitter (Shelley and personal) and we recommend you visit ‘The Real Percy Bysshe Shelley’ Facebook page, too. What new studies of Romantic literature are you reading right now? Obviously, for me as a PB Shelley scholar, the most important book I am in the midst of is John Worthen’s new biography of PBS. (Worthen will also feature in this series soon! -ed.)I could tr
