The group holds regular research seminars at the Institute of English Studies, University of London, to which both part- and full-time research students are invited to contribute.
The spring 2012 seminar series is organised under the theme ‘Romantic Lives’ and will be meeting at the Institute for English Studies, Senate House, on three occasions, 29 February, 14 March and 25 April, each time on a Wednesday between 5.30 and 7.
| NOTE: Paula Byrne’s talk on Jane Austen due to take place on Wednesday, 25th April, at the IES has had to be cancelled due to unforeseen circumstances and will be rescheduled to run as part of a future OU Romantic Period seminar series. This will be announced in due course on the website. |
The series focuses on ways in which the lives and work of romantic writers are being imagined in and for the early twenty-first century. We will be exploring three facets of the continuing life of romantic writers: the revivification of the writer’s life and working practices in the shape of the modern writer’s house museum; the display of writers’ manuscripts and personal relics; and the art and craft of writing new literary biographies of well-known subjects. In these three seminars we will be bringing together two curators and a biographer to discuss how romantic writers are being presented to today’s audiences.
Download the programme as a PDF file.
The structure of the seminar is a 50 minutes talk followed by a glass of wine and questions and discussion. All are welcome.
Follow this link for directions and more details.
Previous seminar series have explored Romantic Women Writers (2010) and Romanticism and Postcolonialism (2010). Past speakers have included Professor Jane Moody (York), Dr Julian North (Leicester), Professor Jacqueline Labbe (Warwick), Professor Tim Fulford (Nottingham Trent), Professor Charles Fosdick (Liverpool), Professor Philip Shaw (Leicester), and Professor Murray Pittock (Glasgow). The 2011 spring/summer series, entitled Romantic Objects, was co-funded and co-organised with Birkbeck, London. The autumn 2011 series, Key Voices of the 1790s, explored the decade in which writing of all kinds – politics, poetry, novels, plays – was transformed by the experience of the French Revolution. Details of the programme are available online.
The Group held a one-day symposium in conjunction with the Open University Book History and Bibliography Group titled ‘The Romantic Book’ hosted by the Institute for English Studies, School for Advanced Study, on Thursday 23 June 2011. Speakers included Luisa Calé (Birkbeck), Stephen Colcough (Bangor), Katie Halsey (Stirling), Anthony Mandal (Cardiff), Lynda Pratt (Nottingham), William St Clair (IES), Shafquat Towheed (OU), and Nicola Watson (OU). Further details are available online.