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  15 May 2012
I've been awarded an 'insight' grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. The grant, worth around $220,000, will sustain my research for the next five years. It will fund students who work with me, travel to research libraries and archives, technical support, conference attendance and other related research expenses. With the help of this funding, I'm going to expand my work on how Romantic poets were represented in nineteenth-century literary anthologies. I plan to undertake a survey of anthologies that will examine more books in more detail than any previous attempt.19 March 2012
Many thanks to everyone who took part in the Interacting with Print conference on Print in the Media Ecology last week. Look out for the digital version of the exhibition, which should be online in a few weeks. The video interviews are being edited and will be on our site soon. You'll also be able to see some photos of the event on our website in the next few days.7 March 2012
 The Interacting with Print research group is holding a conference called Print in the Media Ecology next week (15-16 March). We have a great line-up of speakers from across North America coming to address one large question: how did print interact with other media in Europe between 1700 and 1900? In association with the conference we're also curating an exhibition in Rare Books and Special Collections, producing another installment of our video interviews series, and holding a cinq-a-sept for graduate students to discuss developing our graduate programming. You can read more about it on our website, including the speakers' abstracts. The event is free, and refreshments are provided; RSVPs are encouraged. 5 March 2012
The current issue of RaVoN also includes a review of Romanticism and Celebrity Culture by Eric Eisner (George Mason University). He calls the book "an engaging and timely collection that helps map an important emerging area of Romantic studies" and says that it "makes a strong case for the diversity and significance of celebrity culture in the Romantic period". You can read the whole review here.29 February 2012
 My essay 'Spurgeon, Byron and the Contingencies of Mediation' has appeared as part of a special issue of Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net edited by Andrew Piper and Jonathan Sachs. The popular Victorian preacher Charles Haddon Spurgeon referred to Byron almost forty times in his published works. Drawing on my work in Spurgeon's library, which has survived almost intact, I show how Byron's words were mediated to Spurgeon through a variety of anthologies, primers, and collections of sententiae, and how Spurgeon mediated them to others in turn through his sermons and writings. In the process, Byron's writing was broken into fragments, placed in new contexts, spliced with other people's words, misremembered, misattributed and rendered strange. The essay suggests that analysing this contingent process of mediation reveals alternative possibilities for the study of reception history. You can read the essay here. 27 February 2012
I've been nominated for election to the Advisory Board of the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism (NASSR). The nominations are as follows: 1. Non-US Category: Tom Mole (McGill U) Jonathan Sachs (Concordia U) 2. US Category: Devoney Looser (U of Missouri) Andrew Stauffer (U of Virginia) 3. Non-English Literature Category: Joan Steigerwald (York U) NASSR members can vote by emailing James Allard by 1 March; members are also invited to suggest up to two names to be considered for next year's Advisory Board. 8 February 2012
Thanks to everyone who came to my lecture at Birkbeck, University of London, last week, and especially to Luisa Cale, who invited me. I spoke about my work in progress on the representation of Romantic poets in nineteenth-century literary anthologies.
7 February 2012
The journal Anglia has published a review of Romanticism and Celebrity Culture by Norbert Lennartz. He concludes: "Mole's collection of well-written essays is an indispensable supplement to the numerous histories of and companions to Romanticism. Correcting our image of the Romantic period as a time of diaphanous idealism, the contributors to Mole's book acquaint us with 'the other Romantics': the stars on the stages and in the boxing rings, the lions of the salons and the press and their fans elevating them like waves, leaves and clouds and letting them fall ruthlessly onto the thorns of life. And for all those who despair of the inflation of superstars in our post-modern age the book offers the consoling thought that we are closer to the Romantic age than we thought we were." The full review is available in Anglia 124, pp. 174-77.
7 February 2012
The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Romantic Literature, edited by Frederick Burwick with Nancy Goslee and Diane Hoeveler, has just been published in three handsome volumes, as well as an electronic version. My tiny contribution to this huge endeavour is an entry of 3000 words about poetry reviewing in the period. There are now a number of encyclopedias and other guides to the period available, but this is one of the most ambitious and comprehensive of them all.
8 December 2011
Belatedly, I came across the review of my book in The Year's Work in English Studies the other day. Here it is:"One of the most stimulating books written on Romantic poetry this year was Tom Mole's Byron's Romantic Celebrity: Industrial Culture and the Hermeneutic of Intimacy. Byron's celebrity status has been covered before, but Mole's theoretical aims are much broader than his topic suggests. Celebrity, for Mole, is a 'cultural apparatus' consisting of 'relations between an individual, an industry and an audience' (p. xi). Earlier figures had achieved fame, but Mole argues that Byron was the first who could properly be called a celebrity: 'although the self-presentation of individuals such as Sterne and Garrick included celebrity characteristics, it required the growth of a modern industry of production, promotion and distribution, and a modern audience - massive, anonymous, socially diverse and geographically distributed - before these elements combined to form a celebrity culture in the modern sense' (p. 10). Mole follows up his theoretical argument with seven case studies. He shows how Byron's celebrity made Hebrew Melodies a curiously composite work, intended to represent a religiously serious change in direction. But John Murray clearly wanted more of the same, and, through clever manipulation of print production techniques, managed the poem in such a way as to suggest a formal continuity with his earlier work. Throughout, Mole is strong on the way that 'Byron' emerged through a complicated cultural mechanism involving poet, publishers, printers, advertisers, reviewers, other writers, painters and the reading public. Yet Byron was not simply a passive victim of these cultural conditions. Not only did he exploit them, he made them part of his work. In a superb closing chapter, Mole shows how Don Juan adopts an anachronistic conception of subjectivity as a direct critique of the celebrity culture that Byron had helped instigate. Romantic celebrity, for Mole, helped in the development of modern ideas of selfhood as deep and developmental. The genius of Don Juan is that it undermines these assumptions from the inside. It is a fitting conclusion to an excellent book." YWES (2009) 88(1): 672-769. I've now gathered quotes from all the reviews of this book that I know about on a separate reviews page. 28 November 2011
I'm going to Queen's University, in Kingston, Ontario, tomorrow, to work in the Disraeli Archive there. Benjamin Disraeli was the chairman of the committee that raised a statue to Byron in Hyde Park in 1880, and so I'm going to read correspondence to and from him about the statue.
 21 November 2011
My essay on Elmgreen and Dragset's multimedia installation 'Celebrity: The One and The Many' has appeared in a book dedicated to the duo's work. Elmgreen and Dragset produce fascinating, immersive environments that both implicate the viewer and prompt him or her to reflect. I was asked to write an essay to accompany their latest work, a meditation on celebrity culture that, interestingly, avoids images of particular celebrities as well as eschewing the media that are central to contemporary celebrity. You can see more about the book here.
31 October 2011
Later this week I'm convening a panel at the International Conference on Romanticism, which is being held in Montreal this year. The panel is called 'Print Culture and Reception History' and the speakers are H.J. Jackson and Andrew Stauffer. Michael Gamer is the respondent. The session is at 2pm on Friday in the Delta Hotel, Montreal.
21 October 2011
More rankings news. The Times Higher Education World University Rankings have placed McGill University twenty-first in the world for Arts and Humanities, and twenty-eighth in the world overall. Not quite as good as the QS rankings (see below) which placed us twelfth in the world for English and eighteenth overall, but not bad.
 12 October 2011
Owen Egan took some great photos of Carla Hesse's public lecture for the Interacting with Print Research Group. You'll be able to see more images on the IwP website soon.
 16 September 2011
Today Carla Hesse, Peder Sather Chair in History and Dean of Social Sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences at UC Berkeley, gives a public lecture hosted by the Interacting with Print Research Group and sponsored by the Beatty Memorial Lectures Committee. Her title is "Revolutionary Uses of Print: Publicity and Legitimacy during the French Terror, 1793-1794". The lecture takes place in Bronfman 151, corner of Sherbrooke and McTavish, McGill University. More information here.
7 September 2011
The Beatty Foundation has awarded $2500 to the Interacting with Print Research Group, which I lead, to support next week's public lecture by Carla Hesse. More information on the lecture soon.
5 September 2011
The QS World University Rankings came out today. McGill ranks first in Canada and seventeenth in the world - up from nineteenth last year. This is the eighth year running that McGill has ranked in the top twenty-five.
13 July 2011
My essay '"A Sufficient Tincture of Literature": Byron e il paradigma dei periodici (Byron and the Periodical Paradigm)' has appeared in Byron e il Segno Plurale edited by Diego Saglia (Bologna: Bononia University Press, 2011). Apparently this is the first collection of essays on Byron ever to appear in Italian, which is quite amazing given Byron's connections to Italy. The book includes essays by Jerome McGann, Caroline Franklin, Jane Stabler, Malcolm Kelsall and Philip Davis, among others. It's quite strange to see my writing translated into Italian, a language I cannot read.
6 June 2011
The first ever QS World University Rankings for English Language and Literature came out last week. McGill ranked 12th in the world, below Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge, Berkley, Yale, Columbia, Toronto, Stanford, UCLA, Chicago and Princeton. You can see the full rankings here. Rankings don't really capture the range and sophistication of work being done in English departments around the world, but we're all walking a little taller on campus today knowing that - by one measure at least - this is among the top dozen places on the planet to study literature.
4 May 2011
John Plunkett has reviewed my collection of essays Romanticism and Celebrity Culture in the first issue of the new journal Victoriographies. He writes: "The essays in this illuminating volume demonstrate that numerous factors coalesced between 1750 and 1850 to form the recognisable dynamics of modern celebrity culture, prominent amongst them being the spread of print and visual media, urbanisation and the creation of large, popular audiences, and the spread of commodity culture." He continues: "One of the strengths of this collection is the way that it brings together scholars from different disciplines to address the various arenas in which celebrity functioned". And he concludes: "This volume is clearly a valuable study of the history of celebrity, but its essays also highlight significant moments in the broader histories of print media, theatre, the public sphere, and modern subjectivity. By shining a limelight on this history of celebrity, the volume serves to show how celebrity is increasingly making its presence justifiably felt in broader literary, performance, and cultural histories." You can read the whole review in Victoriographies 1.1, 134-136.
 8 April 2011
Next week I'm going to give a talk at the Robert Penn Warren Centre for the Humanities at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, TN. My title is 'Illustration, Periodicity and Modernity'. Under that rubric I'll be discussing some illustrated editions of Byron's and Wordsworth's poetry from the nineteenth century, and the ways in which they thematise the generational shift between Romantic writers and Victorian audiences.
7 April 2011
Today I teach my last class before going on sabbatical leave next year. Unfortunately there are still a number of things I need to get off my desk before I can turn my full attention to research: exams to grade, applications to the honours programme to review, and the research group's budget to wrangle with.
15 March 2011
Tomorrow I'm flying to Vancouver to give a paper at the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. I'll be speaking on a panel on "The Material Cultures of Authorship" organised by Brian Cowan. The other speakers are Soren Hammerschmidt and David Brewer, and the panel will be chaired by Robert Miles. I'll be talking about the Scott Monument in Edinburgh, which I understand as part of an effort to create new forms of cultural consensus in the Age of Reform.
4 March 2011
McGill University has appointed me a William Dawson Scholar, with effect from 1 May. William Dawson Scholarships are equivalent to Canada Research Chairs, Tier II, and are awarded to "a scholar developing into an outstanding and original researcher of world-class caliber who is poised to become a leader in his or her field". More information is available here.
15 February 2011
The Interacting with Print Research Group, which I lead, is hosting a two-day conference titled "People in the World of Print" on March 10-11 at McGill University. We're delighted to have eight accomplished scholars in the field sharing their work with us: Matt Erlin, Johannes Frimmel, Soren Hammerschmidt, Dahlia Porter, Kristel Smentek, Nikolaus Wegmann, Dan White and Ryan Whyte. This two-day conference brings together specialists in a number of disciplines from across North America and Europe to address one large question from several angles: how did people interact with printed matter in Europe between 1700 and 1900? More information, including abstracts, is available on our website.
14 February 2011
I spent Saturday at a meeting of McGill University's digital humanists, who gathered to talk about their current research interests and to plan how we can build capacity and infrastructure for digital humanities at the University. There is a wide range of projects already underway, from virtual research environments to text and image databases, to text-mining applications. Our challenge now is to bring these endeavours together in a way that will sustain our intellectual momentum and allow us to leverage the funding we need. As part of the meeting, we had a tour of the extraordinary facilties at CIRMMT, the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Music, Media and Technology.
7 January 2011
The Chronicle of Higher Education has published an article by Jeffrey Williams, former editor of the Minnesota Review and an editor of the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, called 'The Statistical Turn in Literary Studies'. In it, he discusses my work on the ninteenth-century literary anthology. I've compiled a database to help study Byron's reception in anthologies published between 1824 and 1900. So far, with the help of my students, I've surveyed around 200 anthologies and identified over 1000 reprints of Byron's poetry. We're currently analysing the data we've gathered, and the preliminary results are very interesting. Subscribers to the Chronicle can see the article here. It's available to non-subscribers for a limited time here.
4 January 2011
Just back from the UK, where I spent ten days over Christmas. On Thursday I'm flying to Los Angeles for the MLA Convention, the largest gathering of scholars in the humanities in North America. I'll be giving a paper on one of the panels organised by the Byron Society of America. My paper, entitled 'Byron in the Nineteenth-Century Pantheon', discusses Byron's statue in Hyde Park in London, and argues that it represents an attempt to embed Byron in the emerging pantheon of Great Britons, as part of a sustained effort to create new forms of national consensus during the Reform agitation. The panel takes place at 8.30am on Sunday 9 January in Platinum Salon H at the Marriott Hotel, Los Angeles.
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   Romanticism and Celebrity Culture  Byron's Romantic Celebrity  Blackwood's Magazine, 1817-1825 |
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