Panelists and Papers: 

• Atesede Makonnen (Johns Hopkins University), “‘The actual sight of the thing’: Horror, Blackness, and Romantic Visualizations of Race”
• Cesar Soto (University of Notre Dame), “‘Reflections on Exile’: Criollo Romanticisms”
• Omar F. Miranda (University of San Francisco), “Romantic Celebrity and the Journal of Exile: El Colombiano and The Liberal”
• Bakary Diaby (Skidmore College), “Feeling Black, Feeling Back: Racism, Fragility, and Romanticism”
• Manu Samriti Chander (Rutgers University--Newark), Respondent
• Moderators: Deanna Koretsky (Spelman College) and Joel Pace (University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire)

Panelists and Papers:

• Jessica Roberson (Mount Saint Mary’s University), “‘In short, I’m sick of sickness’: Thomas Hood, Chronic Illness, and Form”
• Erin Lafford (University of Derby), “‘Fancys or feelings’: John Clare’s Hypochondriac Poetics”
• Thomas J. Brennan (Saint Joseph’s University), “Dramatized Empathy: Aids and Romanticism in Paul Monette’s Last Watch of the Night”
• Chair: John Savarese (University of Waterloo)

Keynote Lecture: ‘“Middle Summer’s Spring”: Seasonable Months, Warming Skies’

Anne-Lise François (University of California, Berkeley)

At the heart of François’s wide-ranging talk was the disturbance that, to borrow Andreas Malm’s term, fossil capital has wrought on the relation of the earth to the sun. Drawing on Malm, but also on Heidegger and the unjustly neglected Marxist historian of agriculture Colin Duncan, François set out how human beings have sought to slip the moors of seasonality in order to foster and indulge a fantasy of the permanent availability of goods – which is a fantasy, not least because one major consequence of the release of the power of the sun stored in fossil fuels is to trap it all over again, only this time with devastating consequences in the atmosphere...

Panelists and Papers:

• Jennifer Davis Michael (University of the South), “Silence and Secrecy in Blake’s Europe”
• Sharon Choe (University of York), “Dismembered and Disenchanted: The Seven Corporeal Ages in The Book of Urizen”
• Martina Zamparo (University of Udine), “’The Male is a Furnace of beryl; the Female is a Golden Loom’: The Energetic Rivalry Between Man and Woman in Blake’s Artistic System”
• Sheila Spector (Independent Scholar), “Blake’s Aesthetic Treatment of Ugolino’s Political Imprisonment”
• Moderator: Colin Trodd (University of Manchester)