I love collaborating with colleagues! Join me at a literature conference soon, or contact me at mcanuel@uic.edu to arrange a speaking engagement.
Come join us at “Romanticism’s Commons,” August 14-16 2025, the annual meeting for the North American Society for the Study of Romantism. It will be held online; more information here:
Keatsians! Join me at The Keats Conference 2025, May 16 @ 1:00 pm – May 18 @ 6:00 pm at the Keats House Museum in Hampstead, London. 10 Keats Grove, London NW3 2RR
Come join us to talk Byron at the MLA in New Orleans on Friday January 10 at 1:45pm!
Romantic Insurrections / Counter-Insurrections: NASSR Conference in Washington DC, August 15-18 2024
We convene the 30th Annual NASSR Conference in Washington D.C., a city that witnessed on January 6, 2021 an insurrection, which Padma Rangarajan has described as a “a rebellion in miniature.” Thinking from this place, we invite participants to reflect on the nature of insurrection and the counter-insurrections that follow in the wake of uprisings. Romanticism has often been associated with the politics of “revolution,” which suggest a wholesale inversion or overturning. We wish to ask about other motions and scales of action and repressive reactions that took place in the nineteenth century. Where did seemingly small acts of resistance spark enormous consequences? How do we understand the relationship between political insurrection and the subjective “state of insurrection and turmoil” that Victor Frankenstein describes or Jane Eyre’s “brain in tumult and…heart in insurrection”? Are there lessons that we can draw from nineteenth-century insurrections – social and textual – and bring to bear upon our present political realities? How might recent uprisings and the often-aligned state and white supremacist counters to them revise our reading of the past?
Please submit abstracts of 250 words, panel proposals of 750 words (including details of individual papers plus a rationale for the panel) using the submission form by January 5, 2024.
MLA Conference in Philadelphia, PA, January 3-7, 2024
Come join us for a panel on Neurodivergent Romanticisms at the MLA! Panelists reconsider the Romantic-era’s renowned reflections on subjectivity, consciousness, memory, and time as expressions and theories of neurodivergence in a period when medical norming of the embodied mind was still developing. We will offer interactive, experiential presentations attuned to a diversity of “bodyminds,” followed by discussion exploring how period authors might offer new forms of nonpathological neurodifference.
Thursday January 4, 21-1:15 in Loews Commonwealth D
Emily Stanback, U of Southern Mississippi, Jared S. Richman, Colorado C, Fuson Wang, U of California, Riverside, Kate Singer, Mt. Holyoke C, Marguerite Vanderford, U of California, Los Angeles, Annika Mann, Arizona State U West and Mark E. Canuel, U of Illinois, Chicago
Past Conferences:
International Conference on Romanticism (ICR) 2023
The Romantic Underground
Incorporated in 1815, Detroit, Michigan was the final stop on the Underground Railroad and welcomed over 50,000 enslaved people fleeing the south. The city continues to interrogate this past through sites such as the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History and the Center for African American Art at the Detroit Institute of Art.
Join us in Detroit for ICR 2023: The Romantic Underground. From the Underground Railroad, to the underground as a place of secrets and mystery, to things that live, grow, and dwell underground, the theme encourages diverse and interdisciplinary topics across such disciplines as art history, cultural history, literary studies, musicology, anthropology, and philosophy.
https://www.oakland.edu/pace/conferences
Romanticism and its Media
The 20th international conference of the Gesellschaft für englische Romantik (Society for English Romanticism) will be hosted by the English Department at Leipzig University.
Local organisers: Prof. Dr. Ralf Haekel & Julia Heinemann
Venue: Bibliotheca Albertina, Beethovenstr. 6, 04107 Leipzig
Date: 5-8 October 2023
Confirmed keynote speakers
- Andrew Burkett (Union College)
- Christina Lupton (University of Warwick)
- Tom Mole (Durham University)
- Sharon Ruston (Lancaster University)
Call for Papers
In the past decades, particularly due to the influence of New Historicism and Gender Studies, Romantic Studies has significantly widened its scope by massively expanding the literary canon as well as investigating a broad range of topics and issues. Today the discipline of Romantic studies is more diverse than it has ever been. The focus on the socio-historical conditions of the Romantic period has also led to a renewed interest in the conditions surrounding the production and reception of literature and the changing mediascape of the years between 1780 and 1830. What is often seen as a media revolution also created the mass readership – particularly of the novel – of the 19th century, and it profoundly influenced the development, and transformation, of literary genres. Furthermore, the development of the modern scientific system with its disciplines and sub-disciplines created new forms of knowledge, which were proliferated through the different forms of periodical publications, reviews, and journals, which, in turn, had an important influence on literature. The changes regarding the production, distribution, and reception of literature also resonate with the field of theory: Romanticism and the (new) media, Romantic forms of (re-)mediation, Romanticism and media theory are some of the numerous media-related approaches used to analyse the paradigm shift setting in at the end of the 18th century.
This conference aims at establishing a dialogue between the different fields exploring Romanticism and its media. One particular goal is to explore constellations of media-related issues that correlate the Romantic age with our own historical period and its questions regarding media and mediation. Considering that the rapidly changing mediascape around 1800 resembles many transformations we observe today, and that our own media environment profoundly shapes our engagement with the Romantic period, many possible fields of investigation emerge: first, historical investigations of manuscripts and forms of print publications have become more widespread through the digitisation of sources and documents, and the process of editing notebooks and journals has become a shared process. In turn, new forms of storage, conservation, and distribution of these manuscripts in the digital age pose questions regarding the material and medial dimension of the original. Second, Romantic topics have been kept alive in and through a wide range of medial manifestations apart from the printed word: in theatre, film and television, and a variety of different digital formats. Contemporary remediations of Romanticism – ranging from Jane Austen fanfiction via period drama and Gothic films to video games – testify to the rich connections between the Romantic period and our own. Finally, media-theoretical questions – theories concerned with media archaeology, media ecology, remediation, or cultural techniques – open up new perspectives on traditional topics, genres, and themes.
We invite proposals for papers in English of 20 minutes each. We especially encourage proposals by PhD and Early Career Researchers. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
- Romantic readership
- Formats and genres of publication
- Manuscript and print
- The transformation of the print market
- Literature, drama, and theatre
- Romantic remediations
- Cultural techniques of Romantic literature
- The media ecology of the Romantic age
- Romantic poetry and Friedrich Kittler’s media theory revisited
- Romantic philosophy and mediation
Please send your abstracts (300 words) with a short biographical note, plus full address and institutional affiliation to Ralf Haekel and Julia Heinemann: romantic-media@uni-leipzig.de
Deadline for proposals: 15 January 2023.
Mark Canuel 
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