You can listen to Episode 1 of Season 4 of The WPHP Monthly Mercury, "'It's (A)Live!' The WPHP Monthly Mercury at New Romanticisms" on Apple, Spotify, Stitcher, Google Podcasts, and other podcast apps, available via Buzzsprout.
In August 2022, Kate and Kandice traveled to Liverpool for “New Romanticisms”: the joint conference for the British Association for Romantic Studies and the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism—BARS and NASSR, respectively. Organized by Dr. Andrew McInnes and his incredible team of research assistants, “New Romanticisms” was a four-day Romanticist extravaganza with five plenaries, more than one hundred panels, the stunning environs of Edge Hill University, an ingenious coffee cart, and the occasional visit from Buster, the campus cat. The call for papers “invite[d] explorations of both the concept of newness in and about the Romantic period and new approaches to Romantic Studies today,” and the conference expressed an openness to ‘alternative’ and ‘innovative’ formats. This led us to wonder: could we create a live episode about the conference?
After nine interviews, twelve months of editing, and thirty-five audio tracks (insert Kate sobbing here), the answer is yes—sort of. Stitching together interviews with conference plenaries, organizers, award winners, and award facilitators, this episode is a truly Frankensteinian attempt to answer the question: What do New Romanticisms sound like?
Check out our bonus series, which features our full interviews with conference keynotes Jennie Batchelor, Manu Samriti Chander, Noah Heringman, Tricia Matthew, and Kirsteen McCue, and conference organizer, Andrew McInnes, here.
Guests:
Jennie Batchelor is the Head of English and Related Literature and Professor of Eighteenth Century Studies at the University of York. Her most recent book is The Lady’s Magazine (1770-1832) and the Making of Literary History (2022).
Manu Samriti Chander is an Associate Professor at Georgetown University. He is a founding member of The Bigger Six Collective and the author of Brown Romantics: Poetry and Nationalism in the Global Nineteenth Century (2017).
Noah Heringman is the Curators’ Professor of English at the University of Missouri, and his most recent book, Deep Time: A Literary History came out in January 2023.
Diana Little is a PhD candidate in the Department of English at Princeton University specializing in transatlantic literatures of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Romanticism, poetry and poetics, histories of science and empire, environmental humanities, and indigenous studies.
Carmen Faye Mathes is an Associate Professor of English at McGill University. Her first book, Poetic Form and Romantic Provocation, came out with Stanford University Press in 2022.
Patricia Matthew is Associate Professor of English at Montclair State University. Another founder of the Bigger Six collective, she is the author of Written/Unwritten: Diversity and the Hidden Truths of Tenure (2016).
Kirsteen McCue is Professor of Scottish Literature and Song Culture and the co-director of the Centre for Robert Burns Studies at the University of Glasgow. Most recently, she has edited the fourth volume of the Oxford Edition of the Works of Robert Burns: Robert Burns’s Songs for George Thomson (2021) and a collection of essays titled An Orkney Tapestry (2021).
Andrew McInnes is a Reader in English Literature at Edge Hill University, the co-director of the EHU Nineteen research group at Edge Hill University, and the author of Wollstonecraft's Ghost: The Fate of the Female Philosopher in the Romantic Period (2017).
Dana Moss is completing her PhD in the English Language and Literature Department at the University of Michigan. Her research interests broadly centre around literatures of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, particularly Romantic literature; questions about violence, excess, intimacy, and identity formation; editorial theory.
At the time of recording, Chloe Dilworth and Roy Bayfield were MA students in Nineteenth Century Studies at Edge Hill University.
Credits:
Produced by: Kate Moffatt and Kandice Sharren
Mixed and mastered by: Alexander Kennard
Music by: Ignatius Sancho, “Sweetest Bard”, A Collection of New Songs (1769) from https://brycchancarey.com/sancho/bard.jpg, and played by Kandice Sharren
Further Reading
Batchelor, Jennie. The Lady's Magazine (1770–1832) and the Making of Literary History. Edinburgh University Press, 2022.
The Bigger Six Collective
Chander, Manu Samriti. Brown Romantics : Poetry and Nationalism in the Global Nineteenth Century. Bucknell University Press, 2017.
Heringman, Noah. Deep Time: A Literary History. Princeton University Press, 2023.
Little, Diana. “Wordsworth's Webs: Spinning the Ecological Elegy.” European Romantic Review, vol. 34, no. 3, 2023, pp. 267–78, https://doi.org/10.1080/10509585.2023.2205077.
Mathes, Carmen Faye. Poetic Form and Romantic Provocation. Stanford University Press, 2022.
Matthew, Patricia A. Written/unwritten: Diversity and the Hidden Truths of Tenure. University of North Carolina Press, 2016.
Mackay Brown, George. An Orkney Tapestry, edited by Kirsteen McCue and Linden Bickett. Polygon, 2021.
McInnes, Andrew. Wollstonecraft's Ghost : the Fate of the Female Philosopher in the Romantic Period. Routledge, 2017.
Moss, Dana. “Waste in the Nineteenth-Century Lyric.” European Romantic Review, vol. 34, no. 3, 2023, pp. 259–65, https://doi.org/10.1080/10509585.2023.2205076.
The Romantic Ridiculous