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  2 August 2010
In two weeks I'll be in Vancouver for the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism conference on Romantic Mediations. I've been invited to give one of nine seminars at the conference: I'll be presenting the underlying theoretical architecture of my new project and seeking feedback on it. My title is "Romanticism, Remediation and Reception History", and you can see an abstract here. Ina Ferris will be chairing the seminar and acting as respondent. The seminar paper should be available in advance to registered participants via the conference website.23 July 2010
On Monday I'm flying to Boston for the 36th International Byron Conference. The topic of the conference is Byron and the Book. I'll be giving a paper about nineteenth-century illustrated editions of Byron, and the ways in which they attempted both to memorialise his achievements and to renovate him for a new generation of readers. 20 July 2010
I heard this morning that I was awarded a Research Development Grant from SSHRC, along with my collaborators Mark Algee-Hewitt and Alan Liu. We plan to explore ways of using digital technologies to bring together the divergent branches of knowledge in the developing field of Book History. Specifically, we will create a dynamic, interactive online bibliography for Book History and Print Culture, which we hope will include new tools to help researchers in the field discover connections between existing scholarship in order to create new avenues for research. The grant is worth $38,000 over the next two years and will allow us to employ programmers and students to help with the project.
9 July 2010
Today's issue of the Times Literary Supplement ("the leading paper in the world for literary culture") includes a review of my essay collection Romanticism and Celebrity Culture. The reviewer is Michael Caines, one of the TLS's editors. He praises the "many extraordinary cases" discussed in the book, which "aims to demonstrate the existence not so much of individual celebrities as of a 'reognisably modern celebrity culture' before the twentieth century". He discusses the essays by Linda Zionkowski, Corin Throsby, Heather McPherson and Judith Pascoe, and concludes that "The essays in this book make a convincing case for the sorrows of celebrity, as well as its alleged charms, in the pre-photographic, pre-cinematic age."31 May 2010
Tomorrow I'm speaking at the Canadian Historical Association conference, as part of the 2010 Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences at Concordia University in Montreal. I'll be on a panel about 'collective biographies' with my colleagues from the Interacting with Print Research Group, Susan Dalton and Eve-Marie Lampron. I'll be speaking about pantheons in nineteenth-century Britain as a form of collective biography.28 May 2010
The Interacting with Print Research Group had a very successful Away-Day today, at Le Germain hotel in Montreal. We discussed our priorities for the next four years, and the things we want to achieve with our new grant. The first public event we're organising is a lecture by Garrett Stewart, from the University of Iowa, who was recently elected as a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The lecture will take place in Montreal in September.23 April 2010
Today is the fifth annual meeting of the Montreal-Ottawa Working Group on Romanticism, which takes place in Montreal this year. Frans de Bruyn, Jason Camlot, Joel Faflak, Ina Ferris, Andrew Piper, Jon Sachs, Michael Eberle-Sinatra, and I will be discussing the work we're doing at the moment.14 April 2010
The Interacting with Print Research Group, for which I am the Principal Investigator, has won a grant from the FQRSC Soutien aux Equipes programme, worth $350,000 over the next four years. We were one of 33 teams funded out of the 94 who applied to this programme. The full results of the competition were announced on the FQRSC's website this morning, and are available here (as a pdf, in French). The grant will allow us to expand the research group's activities significantly, training students, hosting events, and collaborating on research projects in the field of Book History and Print Culture. You can read more about the research group's work over the last five years here. Photo by Owen Egan
13 April 2010
Last week I had the pleasure of introducing Alan Liu from the University of California, Santa Barbara, when he gave the Maxwell Cummings Distinguished Lecture in the Faculty of Arts at McGill and the keynote address at the North Eastern Modern Languages Association (NEMLA). Alan Liu has been a leading figure in the field of Romanticism, an important critic of the New Historicism, and a pioneer of Digital Humanities. He gave two outstanding lectures, called 'Friending the Past: The Sense of History and Social Computing' (at McGill) and 'From Reading to Social Computing' (at NEMLA).23 March 2010
This Friday the Interacting with Print Research Group, for which I am the Principal Investigator, is hosting a one-day workshop on the topic of 'Print, Agency and Interaction'. We've got four great speakers: Clifford Siskin from NYU, Ben Kafka also from NYU, Betty Schellenberg from Simon Fraser and Mark Algee-Hewitt, our new Mellon Postdoc here at McGill. The workshop takes place in Arts 160 from 10am to 4.30pm. You can read more about it here.2 March 2010
Next weekend I'm going to a conference on Anthologies at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, organised by Thora Brylowe, along with my students Tara Murphy and Amy Fox. The three of us are presenting a panel about the database of nineteenth-century literary anthologies we've been compiling over the last couple of years, and what it's enabled us to learn about how the anthologies shaped Byron's posthumous reputation.20 January 2010
My review of Ghislaine MacDayter's book Byromania and the Birth of Celebrity Culture has appeared in the latest issue of The Byron Journal. The book represents a valuable contribution to the emerging understanding of Byron's celebrity, and it convincingly argues that trying to separate his celebrity from political readings of his work is bound to fail, because Byromania was a political phenomenon from the outset.15 January 2010
Today I was interviewed by Will Robertson from the Department of English Students Association at McGill, as part of their "Get to Know your Professors" series. Will asked me about my education and experience, my favorite bits of my job, and what I'm working on at the moment.4 January 2010
The Winter Term at McGill starts today. I'm teaching two classes this term: 'Sociology and Materiality of Texts', which has 60 students enrolled, and 'Intersections of Literary and Visual Culture in the Nineteenth Century', which has 20 students enrolled. Short descriptions of both classes are here. Students who have registered for the classes can access more information via WebCT. |
   Romanticism and Celebrity Culture  Byron's Romantic Celebrity  Blackwood's Magazine, 1817-1825 |
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