North American Society for the Study of Romanticism
Chicago 2019
Panel: “Melancholic Environment”

• Chair: Kathryn Ready (The University of Winnipeg)
• Benjamin Blackman (UC Davis), "Melancholy Matters: Wollstonecraft's Empty Commerce"
• Shelby Carr (Lehigh University), "'I, the offspring of love, and the child of the woods': Natural Oblivion in Mary Shelley's Matilda"
• Taylin Nelson, "'Ever open grave': Romantic Melancholy and Devouring Landscapes"

Reviewed by Elizabeth Giardina (University of California, Davis)

This panel largely cohered around how the affective state of melancholy affords individual freedoms and the ability to imagine oblivion as well as obfuscated systems of capital. The three speakers all engaged with melancholy as a mood with specific, circumstantial utilities, whether as a heuristic for thinking about the heavy dangers of industrialization or as an...

North American Society for the Study of Romanticism
Chicago 2019
Panel: “Elemental Technologies"

• Chair: Nicholas Halmi (Oxford University)
• Andrew Barbour (University of California, Berkeley), “Blake’s Industrial Revolutions”
• Jennifer Yida Pan (University of Chicago), “Elemental Technology in Romanticism, or forms of hinging”
• John Mulligan (Rice University), “Romantic Data: Knowledge Discovery in the Herschel Archive”

Reviewed by Ben Blackman (University of California, Davis)

By now, the notion that Romanticism and technology are antithetical, or even unrelated and contained within separate spheres of the total human experience, has been, and continues to be, thoroughly debunked, as illustrated by this fruitful panel at NASSR’s 2019 meeting in Chicago. Recent books by Mark Coeckelbergh and John Tresch, unambiguously titled New Romantic Cyborgs...

International Conference on Romanticism
Manchester 2019
Panel: "Nineteenth-Century Receptions"

• Chair: Ingrid Hanson (The University of Manchester)
• Rachel Lewis (University of California, Berkeley), “Seeing Shelley Plain: Mediating the Romantic Past in Browning and James”
• Matthew Ward (University of Birmingham), “Arnold’s Struggle with Byron”
• Federica Coluzzi (The University of Manchester), “Beyond Creative Appropriation: The Romantic Critical Discourse on Dante from Coleridge to G. Rossetti”
• Alessia Benedetti (The University of Manchester), “Between Romanticism and Anti-Romanticism: A Journey Across Pre- and Post-Revolutionary Reception of Dante in Russia”

Reviewed by Lucia Scigliano (Durham University)

The panel “Nineteenth-Century Receptions” provided a wide-ranging and far-reaching understanding of cultural and literary receptions in the nineteenth...

Lee Nevitt
Tufts University

On Thursday, April 20, 2017, the Red Bull Theater of New York City produced a dramatic reading of Lord Byron’s Manfred. This performance preceded a day-long international symposium on the play at New York University. The two-day event brought local theater-goers together with Byron scholars from around the world in celebration of the bicentenary of the play’s publication in 1817. As the organizer of both events, Omar F. Miranda (University of San Francisco), remarked: “In order to commemorate Manfred’s 200th anniversary, I was fortunate enough to bring together some of the very best theater experts and literary critics. We collaborated with one of the greatest classical theater companies of New York City for the play’s production. I also invited several distinguished Byron scholars from across the globe (including Britain, Italy, the Netherlands, and Australia) to offer new critical perspectives at our #Romantics200 symposium. Broadview Press...