Romantic Circles Pedagogies Commons

The Romantic Circles Pedagogy Commons is a peer-reviewed online journal dedicated to the presentation of essays about teaching that offer sample teaching materials as well, from printable handouts to "digital-born" teaching materials.

Teach (the) Romantic / Romantic Teaching, Vol. 1 | June 2021
For the past several years Romantic Circles Pedagogies Commons has published special volumes that speak to specific issues within romanticist pedagogy, such as “Romanticism and Technology,” “Teaching Global Romanticism,” or “Teaching the Romantic with the Contemporary.” For this 2-part volume, assembled during the COVID 19 crisis, we purposely stepped back and focused more broadly on essays that offer innovative approaches to teaching romanticism. By focusing on innovative pedagogies that seek to redefine “the romantic” in various ways and consider the romanticism as a place of engagement rather than administration. The essays collected are keen examples of this revisionary and processual pedagogy. They ask us to reconsider our relationship to the two key moments of any pedagogical project, what was and what is yet to be.
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Teaching Romanticism in the Anthropocene | June 2020
The essays on Teaching Romanticism in the Anthropocene collected in this volume craft an intersectional Romantic pedagogy of resistance to human-made climate change in the Anthropocene. The contributors variously demonstrate across texts, periods, and media that such a pedagogy rejects ideas about “humans as one unified species” and seeks instead a dialogue between race, class, gender, sexuality, nonhumans, and queer alignments, among others.
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Teaching Global Romanticism | March 2020

The essays on Teaching Global Romanticism collected here present varied approaches to teaching Romanticism in a global context through individual assignments, units, and syllabi. The contributors share ways to enrich pedagogical approaches to Romantic literature and culture with texts and ideas from beyond Britain and America. These essays discuss how literature guides students’ engagement with international themes and issues in the Romantic period and after. The initiative for this volume began under the leadership of William Stroup.

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Romanticism and Technology | November 2017

This collection came together as the result of the annual Romantic Circles-NASSR (North American Society for the Study of Romanticism) Pedagogy Prize. Lindsey Eckert and Lissette Lopez Szwydky, co-winners of the 2014 prize, separately submitted projects that included technology as central components of their courses. Together, the six essays in this volume speak to the value of collaboration, interdisciplinary teaching, and public humanities. Underscoring all of the contributions is a belief that Romantic literature is uniquely suited to innovate pedagogical approaches that embrace new technologies because the historical period itself was characterized by questions about technology, its consequences, and its possibilities. As scholars and educators of Romanticism, we see strong parallels between the period that we teach and the age in which we live. Using multimedia projects, the essays in this collection approach themes central to Romanticism—nature, rights, collaboration, reading, the public sphere—through the Industrial Revolution at the turn of the nineteenth century and the digital revolution at the turn of the twenty-first century. This volume provides practical overviews of technical and digital alternative assignments that can be incorporated into Romantic-period courses, including critical reflection about the value of digital projects in the humanities.

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Pedagogies Hangouts | July 2017

Pedagogies Hangouts is a multimedia series that brings together scholars and teachers of Romanticism at all levels to talk about the possibilities and challenges of teaching in the twenty-first century.

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Study Abroad in the Lake District | May 2017

This collection grows out of a 2014 conference panel at the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism (NASSR), in which five of our six authors shared their varied experiences leading study-abroad courses and field schools to various parts of England and France. These experiences ranged from do-it-yourself plans to full partnerships with third-party organizers, with a similar range of flexibility and cost. Taken together, five areas shape the concerns of the five chapters: models of study and the logistics of running them; models of leadership; types of assignments and excursions; forms of collaborative teaching and learning; and the value of international education for humanities-based learning. This volume will provide practical and experience-based information about study-abroad programs as well as critical reflection about methods and motives.

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Teaching Romanticism with the Contemporary | April 2017

This special issue explores the notion that many of the forms, ideas, and practices inaugurated or exemplified in the Romantic period continue to shape and drive our contemporary discourses. Literary critics, cultural and political theorists, and, indeed, our students continue to encounter new permutations—if not the continued presence—of something that might be called the romantic. But how is the (neo-)romantic expressed in contemporary culture? And how might we best prepare students to listen for and hear its repetitions? How might we teach the romantic alongside the contemporary without either reducing one to the other or eliding important historical, cultural, and social contexts? In response to these questions, the nine essays and three interviews that comprise this volume address the repetitions and reverberations of the romantic as it recurs across genre, period, and media boundaries in popular culture, contemporary political situations, changing classroom dynamics, and the constantly shifting domains of literary and pedagogical practice and production.

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Teaching Romanticism and Literary Theory | December 2016

These essays reflect on the ways contributors integrate literary theory into their teaching of Romanticism and reflect on the continued importance of literary theory to Romanticism and the work of Romanticists. Collectively the essays broach a range of questions, but perhaps most importantly: why teach Romanticism and literary theory today? How does teaching Romanticism with literary theory alter our ideas of both?

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William Blake and Pedagogy | July 2016

The present Romantic Circles Pedagogies volume intervenes in the notion that pedagogy is of a secondary concern to Blake scholars by showing how William Blake’s work can invigorate the classroom.  Contributors use Blake’s inspiration to create new teaching methodologies, propose new assignments, engage new public audiences, and critically explore the emergence of new technological modalities.  Famously difficult, Blake nevertheless constructs crucial dialogues in fields from the digital humanities to manuscript history and affect theory.  This volume shows how teachers can take advantage of his holistic approach to pedagogy—his insistence that teaching is entangled with every part of our lives—to contest standard approaches to Blake in the literature classroom.

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Romantic Education: Romantic Pedagogies and New Approaches to Teaching Romanticism | May 2016
These essays offer diverse ways of thinking about the intersections of Romanticism and pedagogy: both what Romantic-era figures themselves thought about the processes of learning and teaching and also what we as modern educators might consider as we present these texts and figures to our students. It is our hope that they will contribute to ongoing conversations among scholars and teachers of Romanticism about the history and future of humanities education, and in particular will foster cross-historical conversations.
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Teaching Jane Austen | April 2015
The essays collected here describe curricular ideas, innovations, and practices that seek to move us beyond simple questions of Austen’s accessibility, relevance, and context. The contributors ask how we might enrich the teaching of Austen’s fiction by seeing her in conversation with manuscript culture, children’s literature, Harry Potter, or Romantic poetry. Collectively, these essays look to what it means to teach Austen in many kinds of classes and classrooms, with differently located learners and with a variety of texts, tools, and assignments.
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Translation Theory / Pedagogical Practice: Teaching Romantic Translation(s) | July 2014
In recent years, we have witnessed the rapid migration of the field of translation studies from occupying its position as “a backwater of the university” in the 1990s—to cite Lawrence Venuti’s oft-quoted complaint—to becoming a central object of scholarly inquiry in literary and cultural studies and beyond. Even as numerous conferences, symposia, and institutes are organized around the topic of translation, course readings in English literature have not yet come to reflect the same transformative impulse. In diverse ways, the scholars collected in this volume make compelling cases for expanding the repertoire of texts worthy of study in English classrooms to include translations, addressing texts by a wide range of authors and translators including Lord Byron, J.W. von Goethe, S.T. Coleridge, P.C. de Laclos, George Eliot, Sei Shônagon, and Germaine de Staël.
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Teaching Romantic Drama | May 2011
This special issue of Romantic Circles Pedagogies extends a conversation about teaching Romantic drama that has been a part of the larger reevaluation of Romantic-era drama and theatre over the past fifteen years or so. While there have been many scholarly publications, conference panels, and digital and print dramatic publication initiatives to advance work in British theatre and drama studies of the Romantic era, most of the conversation about teaching Romantic drama has been a matter of occasional collegial sharing and listserv posting. It seemed a good time to develop a special issue that would illustrate the many different ways of framing curriculum, working out instructional ideas, and engaging students with British Romantic theatre and drama in ways suited to different programmatic and curricular contexts.
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Novel Prospects: Teaching Romantic-Era Fiction | August 2008
This collection explores the challenges of teaching narrative fiction published between 1789 and 1830. These essays engage with the ways in which Romantic-era fiction challenges not just period conventions, but pedagogical practices and undergraduate scholarship. Topics examined include issues raised by teaching "historical" novels to modern students, reading Jane Austen in a time of war, depictions of racialized bodies in reformist fictions, and situating Romantic fictions in place and social contexts. Emphasizing new possibilities for classroom teaching and demonstrating that scholarly pursuits and teaching need not exist in separate spheres, the essays also offer practical approaches to "folding" Romantic-era fiction into existing course projects at the same time that they examine the questions raised by including texts and writers that, until recently, have been largely ignored.
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Romanticism, Ecology and Pedagogy | December 2006
The essays in this collection offer practical ways of improving students' skills at explicating British literature of the Romantic period, while helping them to understand Romanticism's contribution to the history of modern environmentalism. More fundamentally, it is around the issues of ethical, aesthetic, and economic values that these essays collectively raise their most important points. All of the essays are closely engaged with practical aspects of teaching environmental literature of the Romantic period, and they should prove useful to both new and experienced teachers in a variety of classroom settings.
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Innovations | December 2004
This issue contains news about online tools now available for courses in Romanticism, including an essay by Mark Phillipson on Wikis, two essays by Jerome McGann and Johanna Drucker on IVANHOE v. 1.0, an interview with Ben Jacks about the use of poetry in an architecture class, and a more traditional class on Romantic Ecology, designed by Walter Reed, that has been infused with new technologies. The issue also contains materials available for use in your classrooms: audio files for songs penned by Burns, Flash picture presentations, and online syllabi and assignments that you can use or download.
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