Romantic Medicine & the Gothic Imagination
Conference Activities
NASSR Plenary Speakers
Thursday, March 30: Doran Larson
Doran Larson is Edward North Professor of Literature & Creative Writing at Hamilton College. He led a writing workshop inside Attica Correctional Facility from 2006 to 2016. He is the founding organizer of the AA-degree granting Attica-Genesee Teaching Project, and of the award-winning AA-degree granting Hamilton-Herkimer College College-in-Prison Program at Mohawk CF, a consortium of Hamilton College, Colgate University, and Herkimer Community College. His most recent book is Witness in the Era of Mass Incarceration: Discovering the Ethical Prison (2017). He is the editor of Fourth City: Essays from the Prison in America (2014), the largest print collection to date of non-fiction essays by currently incarcerated people writing about their experience inside. He founded and directs The American Prison Writing Archive, a fully searchable digital archive of over 4 million words of first-person prison witness. His new book, Inside Knowledge: The Lessons Prisons Teach, will appear in 2023.
Thursday, March 30: Julia M. Wright
Julia M. Wright, FRSC, is Professor and George Munro Chair of Literature and Rhetoric at Dalhousie University, Canada, and she works primarily on nationalism and ideas of the nation in Romantic-era literature, including those tied to maritime or medical frameworks. She is the author of four monographs, including two on Irish Romanticism: Ireland, India, and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Literature (2007) and Representing the National Landscape in Irish Romanticism (2014). She has edited two novels by Lady Morgan, The Missionary (2002) and The O’Briens and the O’Flahertys (2013), Irish Literature, 1750-1900: An Anthology (2008), and the two-volume Companion to Irish Literature (2010). She has also co-edited a further seven volumes, including Reading the Nation in English Literature (2009) with Elizabeth Sauer, Transatlantic Literary Exchanges, 1790-1870 (2011) with Kevin Hutchings, A Handbook to Romanticism Studies (2012) with Joel Faflak, and Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale (2020) with Jason Haslam.
In addition to her work on Irish Romanticism and the Gothic more broadly, including Men with Stakes: Masculinity and the Gothic in US Television (2016), she has also published on higher-education issues and research policy. She is currently finishing a three-year term as President of the Academy of the Arts and Humanities in the Royal Society of Canada and is a member of the RSC Task Force on COVID-19. As part of her work on oceans, she co-founded the Social Sciences and Humanities Ocean Research and Education network and is now part of a multidisciplinary research group examining sustainable oceans in connection to sustainable diets. She has also written for non-academic forums, including two pieces for The Conversation and various op-eds.
Friday, March 31: Michael Scrivener
Recently retired from Wayne State University, Distinguished Professor of English, Michael Scrivener has received a Keats-Shelley Distinguished Scholar Award (2006) and a Guggenheim Fellowship (2007). He has authored books, articles/chapters, and reviews in Romantic Studies and Jewish Studies. The monographs: Radical Shelley (1982), Seditious Allegories: John Thelwall and Jacobin Writing (2001), The Cosmopolitan Ideal in the Age of Revolution and Reaction, 1776-1832 (2007), Jewish Representation in in British Literature, 1780-1840 (2011). The edited and co-edited books: Poetry and Reform: Periodical Verse from the English Democratic Press, 1792-1824, (1992), Two Plays by John Thelwall, with F. Felsenstein, (2006); The Daughter of Adoption by John Thelwall, with J. Thompson & Y. Solomonescu, (2013). His current project is a book on John “Jew” King (1753-1823), his daughters (Charlotte and Sophia), and their context [a recent publication from the project: “Situating the King Sisters within Literary Tradition,” in Sundry Faces of 19th-Century Anglo-Jewish Literature, ed. K. Weisman, Praxis, Nov. 2020, in Romantic Circles [https://romantic-circles.org/praxis/sundryfaces/praxis.2020.sundry.scrivener.html]. Scrivener now lives in New Jersey close to his family (and the NYPL), after having spent over four decades in the Detroit area.
Saturday, April 1: Essaka Joshua
Essaka Joshua is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London, a Fellow of the Nanovic Institute, University of Notre Dame, and a Fellow of John J. Reilly Center for Science, Technology, and Values, University of Notre Dame. Her first two books Pygmalion and Galatea (2001) and The Romantics and the May Day Tradition (2007) were published by Ashgate (and reprinted by Routledge). Professor Joshua’s latest book is Physical Disability in British Romantic Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2020). She works on Disability Studies, Romantic-era and Victorian British Literature, Myth and Folklore.
Seminars
Seminars are limited to 15 participants; save your seat in conference registration!
Thursday
Virtual Seminar: Percy Shelley for Our Times, with Omar F. Miranda and Kate Singer
Sponsored by the Keats-Shelley Association of America
Moderators: Omar F. Miranda (University of San Francisco) and Kate Singer
(Mount Holyoke College)
Our seminar asks participants to discuss how we might write and teach a Percy Shelley ‘for our times,’ in advance of a collection of essays with that name. While the many bicentennial events around important publication dates and deaths have attempted to celebrate, if not memorialize, the Romantics’ haunting present in literary studies and a public readership, this volume asks how Shelley might have already been writing of a future audience, thinking of us thinking about him. Considering a Shelley reading practice as “ten thousand orbs involving and involved” (PU IV.241), we invited readers to think creatively and experiment tall about how Shelley might have imagined different audiences across spaces and times, and how we might connect Shelley to our own and other moments. Participants might bring their favorite Shelley poems and other passages from poems and scholarship that would speak to our times.
Friday
Virtual Seminar: Introduction to COVE Studio, with Dino Franco Felluga
This COVE workshop will serve as an introduction to COVE Studio and COVE Editions, with a special concentration on Romantic content and teaching ideas. Topics covered will include: building an anthology, creating a group, annotation (including multimedia), upload, timeline-building, map-building, gallery-building, and edition-building. Access to COVE Studio and COVE Editions is a benefit of NASSR membership.
In-person seminar, rm. 235D: Romanticism and Sound, with Padma Rangarajan and Michele Speitz
It has been fifteen years since Romantic Circles published a collection of essays on sound and Romantic poetry. In advance of a forthcoming collection of essays on Romanticism and Sound Studies in the same journal, this seminar considers the challenges and rewards of tuning into the sonic. Potential topics discussed in this seminar include sonic warfare, the ephemerality of sound, and Burke and the politics of the sonic sublime.
Saturday
In-person seminar, rm.235D: Romantic Hope, with Adam Potkay
Seminar participants will engage in a critical discussion of portions of Adam Potkay's 2022 book, Hope: A Literary History, shortlisted for the Wordsworth-Coleridge Association Marilyn Gaull Prize. Material covered will include the case in antiquity against hope; hope as a theological virtue; and the Romantic transformation of hope, with readings focused on Wordsworth and Percy Shelley. Discussion may range more generally over the history of emotions, philosophy/theology and literature, and the place of Romanticism in broader histories. Readings will be distributed in advance, in pdf, to seminar participants.
Book Exhibit
Essays in Romanticism
The Keats-Shelley Journal
Journal & Books in Romanticism
Lewis Walpole Page 1
Lewis Walpole Page 2
European Romantic Review
Studies in English Literature Page 1
Studies in English Literature Page 2
Special Events
NASSR Mentoring Program Launch
A discussion over lunch, Friday, March 23, 2023
Hosted by Mark Lussier (Arizona State University) and sponsored by NASSR VIDEO INVITATION
Register for the luncheon at conference registration; please register before March 15.
Friday, March 31 Mentoring Program luncheon: Mark Lussier
Mark Lussier is Dean of the Emeritus College and Emeritus Professor of English and Sustainability at Arizona State University and has published the monographs Romantic Dynamics (1999) and Romantic Dharma (2011). He also edited/co-edited Reading Blake/Blake Reading (1986), Feminist Literary Criticism: Theory and Politics (1986), Perspective in the Art, History and Literature of Early Modern England (1994), Romanticism and the Physical (2002), Engaged Romanticism (2006), Romanticism and Buddhism (2006), and Engaged Romanticism (2008). His essays have appeared in major journals in the field, including Arts Quarterly, Italian Culture, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, Religion and Belief, Literature and Religion, Romantic Circles Praxis, Studies in Romanticism, Visible Language, Women’s Studies, and The Wordsworth Circle. His forthcoming monograph, The Encyclopedia of Romantic Writers and Writing, was co-authored with Dana Tait and will appear in 2023.