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 16 November 2009
I'm giving a talk next week for the Montreal British History Seminar. This will be the first time I've given a full-length lecture about my new research on the various projects for commemorating Romantic authors in the nineteenth century. My paper is called 'Secular Pantheons in Nineteenth-Century Britain', and it takes place on Thursday 26 November at Concordia University in the Hall Building, Room 769. 9 November 2009
Next week the Interacting with Print Research Group is hosting a graduate seminar with Dena Goodman, from the University of Michigan. The seminar is called 'Reading and Writing: How Young French Women Interacted with Print in the Eighteenth Century' and it takes place on Friday 20 November from 10am to noon in the Arts Council Room (Arts 160). You can see more information, including preparatory readings, here.2 November 2009
My book Byron's Romantic Celebrity has won the Elma Dangerfield Prize for 2009. I share the prize with Ghislaine McDayter for her book Byromania and the Birth of Celebrity Culture. The Elma Dangerfield Award is given annually by the International Byron Society to an outstanding book. It was set up in 1986 by anonymous donors to identify and reward new and original scholarship related to the life, works and times of Lord Byron.29 October 2009
I'm off to New York next week for the International Conference on Romanticism, which is being held this year at the City College and the Graduate Centre of the City University of New York. The conference theme is Romanticism and the City. I'll be presenting a paper about nineteenth-century schemes to erect memorials to writers in London, which effectively reimagine the metropolis as a necropolis, a space of memory haunted by reminders of the mighty dead. The paper is called 'Romanticism and the Memorial City'. 28 October 2009
Tomorrow I'm hosting a "Tea and Poetry" event for the Department of English Students' Association. The event will have a Halloween theme, so I'll be reading some spooky poetry by Shakespeare, Goethe, Christopher Logue, Thomas Lovell Beddoes and Charles Causley.16 October 2009
Today I chaired the Great Arts Debate as part of McGill's homecoming week. Professors Allana Thain, Richard Taws, Stuart Soroka and Sarah Stroud teamed up with four students to argue two motions in short and entertaining debates. The motions were "This house believes the preservation of historical sites is a waste of money" and "This house believes the demise of the printed press is no big deal."29 September 2009
I've been invited to give a seminar at the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism Conference in 2010 in Vancouver. Each year, around six scholars are invited to lead a seminar on their work at the conference. This year's conference is called 'Romantic Mediations' and is being co-hosted by Simon Fraser University and the University of British Columbia. My seminar will be called 'Romanticism, Remediation, and Reception History' and will explore some of the work I'm currently doing on the reception of Romantic authors in the later nineteenth century, and the theoretical apparatus I'm developing for that work.28 September 2009
News arrived last week that Mark Algee-Hewitt has won a Mellon postdoctoral fellowship to work at McGill with the Interacting with Print Group. Building on his Ph.D. at New York University, where he developed groundbreaking database-driven methodologies for studying literary history, Mark will bring his expertise in humanities computing to the research group. His fellowship begins in January and lasts for one year, renewable for a second year.13 August 2009
The Byron Journal has published a review of Byron's Romantic Celebrity by Jane Stabler. She praises the "beautifully articulated discussion of the etymology of 'celebrity'" with which the book begins. She doesn't like the phrase "somatic inscription" which I use in Chapter Four, but she thinks that "in other chapters the writing is crisper and more playful and the textual commentary much more nuanced." She finds the chapter on Childe Harold, Canto III, "brilliant and compelling" and says that it "illustrates all the strengths of the book in provocative contextual relocation, sharp attention to the material history of the poems and perceptive close reading." She concludes that "this is a stringent and searching book and a timely one, too". The review is in The Byron Journal 37.1 (2009), 64-66. 7 August 2009
My friend Andrew Piper has just started the Bad Ideas Blog. The blog is a home for all those ideas that don't quite make it into published books. It's also a place to reflect on what makes an idea "bad" - that is, what makes it unsuitable for a certain form, genre or medium. Can an idea that's bad for a book be good for a blog? To get the ball rolling, I've written a post about some of the ideas I cut out of the last chapter of my book Byron's Romantic Celebrity. 26 May 2009
The journal Romanticism has published a review of my book by Christine Kenyon Jones. She says "Tom Mole's study of Byron's celebrity has found a genuinely new way of approaching the poet and his work". She praises "several passages of fine close reading in the book" and concludes that "a serious, theorised approach to celebrity makes an excellent context in which to study Byron's work." She also gives a great summary of the book's chapters. The full review is in Romanticism 15.1 (2009), 89-91. 25 May 2009
I've just got back from the NASSR conference at Duke University, where I spoke yesterday about the statue of Byron erected in Hyde Park in 1880 and the debates that surrounded it. Highlights of the conference for me were Denise Gigante's seminar on the essay as a form, as well as an all-too-rare reunion of the contributors to the Blackwood's edition.20 May 2009
Official confirmation arrived today that McGill University has given me tenure and promoted me to the rank of Associate Professor, with effect from 1 June.12 May 2009
The British Association of Romantic Studies Bulletin and Review has published a review of my book by Caroline Franklin. She calls the book 'a well-written, lively study' and concludes: 'This monograph succeeds admirably in combining sensitive textual analysis, careful bibliographical research and awareness of the broader material aspects of the history of print culture.'14 April 2009
In a couple of weeks I'm going to the 2009 meeting of the Montreal/Ottawa Working Group in Romanticism, which will be held in Ottawa this year. The working group provides a very productive opportunity to share work in progress in an informal setting. I'm going to talk about my work on illustrated editions of Romantic authors in the nineteenth century, as well as trying to explain how my thinking about the shape of my larger project has developed over the last year.
12 April 2009
In association with the graduate seminar led by Michelle Levy, the Interacting with Print Group has mounted an exhibition called 'Interactions of Script and Print in the Nineteenth Century', curated by Ben Barootes and me. As Michelle argued in her seminar, manuscript was not simply superseded by print in the nineteenth century. Manuscript texts circulated alongside printed matter and intersected with it in a variety of ways. Poets circulated works in manuscript before having them printed and readers remixed print culture by creating scrapbooks that were part print and part script. Handwritten commonplace books imitated the layout of printed pages and printed texts included facsimiles of handwriting or typefaces that imitated manuscript. Readers marked the margins of their books, and gift books included presentation pages, which encouraged readers to write in the book. Displayed together, the manuscript and printed texts in the exhibition survey a nineteenth-century media ecology in which script and print fed off each other in unexpected ways, generating new cultural possibilities through their mutual interactions. The exhibition is in the Rare Books and Special Collections Division on the fourth floor of the McLennan Library until the end of the month. You can read more about it here.6 April 2009
The Interacting with Print Group held its second annual graduate seminar last week, with Michelle Levy from Simon Fraser University. She gave a really interesting, wide-ranging and theoretically sophisticated talk on 'British Romanticism and the Survival of Manuscript Culture'. It was followed by an excellent discussion with the graduate students, who bought a variety of disciplinary perspectives and research specialities to bear on the issues Michelle raised. When we talk about Romantic print culture, we often think of print as displacing manuscript or rendering it obsolete. But Michelle argues that manuscript circulation not only continued to operate alongside print in the period, but may even have experienced a resurgence of importance. You can read more about the seminar here.28 February 2009
The Globe and Mail, Canada's National Newspaper, has published an article I wrote about the history and future of book reviewing. The Washington Post's 'Book World' section is closing, but at the same time new blogs about books seem to be springing up all over the place. My piece will be on the Globe and Mail's website for the next week. You can read it here.10 February 2009
NEW BOOK Later this year, Cambridge University Press will publish a collection of essays I've edited called Romanticism and Celebrity Culture, 1750-1850. This is the first collection of essays devoted to the celebrity culture of the Romantic period in Britain. It brings together contributors from several disciplines (and three continents) to study that cultural apparatus from a number of different angles. Taken together, the essays add up to the fullest account of Romantic celebrity culture available, and a more detailed account of its different manifestations than any one scholar could produce. You can read more about the book by clicking on the cover, to the right of this page.6 February 2009
My review of Claire Brock's book The Feminization of Fame, 1750-1830 has been published in the latest issue of Romanticism. As a special promotion, Edinburgh University Press, who publish the journal, are offering free online access for a couple of months. So whether or not you subscribe to Romanticism, you can see the review here. The book usefully reveals how many women in the Romantic period actively sought and enjoyed personal fame. But I don't think it manages to distinguish between the varieties of fame available in the period, or to offer a fully worked-out theory of Romantic celebrity culture.19 December 2008
 It's nearly time for the MLA Convention in San Francisco. I have organised one of the two sessions sponsored by the Byron Society of America. It's called 'Byron and/as/in Popular Culture' and I'm really pleased with the line-up of speakers. It takes place on Saturday, 27 December at 3.30pm in 'Golden Gate 1' at the San Francisco Hilton: Byron and/as/in Popular Culture Presiding: Tom Mole, McGill Univ. 1. 'Picturing Celebrity: Byron, West, and LEL', Susan J. Wolfson, Princeton Univ. 2. 'The Culture of Comparison: Byron in The Satirist', Mark L. Schoenfield, Vanderbilt Univ. 3. 'The Sensation of Byron', Emily Allen, Purdue Univ.; Dino Franco Felluga, Purdue Univ. The other session is going to be a conversation with Benjamin Markovits, who is writing a trilogy of historical novels based on episodes in Byron's life. Jonathan Gross and Katherine Kernberger will be asking him about his work. 20 November 2008
Today I'm showing Patricia Rozema's "post-colonial" adaptation of Jane Austen's Mansfield Park to some of my students. I'm hoping it will give us an opportunity to discuss several aspects of the novel, but especially the role that the slave trade may - or may not - play in it. The adaptation takes some liberties with the text in order to bring out the theme of empire (if theme it is), but the performance by Harold Pinter is really good. Here's the trailer:19 November 2008
The journal Studies in Hogg and his World has published a review of the Blackwood's edition that I worked on. The reviewer praises Tony Jarrells's introduction to volume 2, and the facsimile reprints of the Noctes Ambrosianae in volumes 3 and 4, as well as the "two excellent volumes" of criticism. "These volumes", he says, "form an impressive collection of contemporary discussions of the literature of the period, and provide important insights into the personal and political nature of reviewing at this time." He wishes we could have had an extra volume to include more material.27 October 2008
This week I'm speaking at the English Department Symposium, which this year is called "Performing Authorities". It takes place in Leacock 232 from 4pm to 9pm on Thursday. I'll be talking about projects to commemorate Byron in the nineteenth century, and especially this statue of Byron in Hyde Park: Here's the programme for the symposium: DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH ANNUAL SYMPOSIUM Thursday 30 October 2008, 4.00 – 9.00 pm Leacock 232 PERFORMING AUTHORITIES 4.00 pm Holly Luhning: "Eliza Haywood and the Literary Marketplace: Crafting and Managing a Public Persona" 4.30 pm Marianne Stenbaek: "Victorian Photography and Arctic Explorations" 5.00 pm Tom Mole: "Authority and Amnesia: Byron and Wellington in Hyde Park" 5.30 pm Sebastian Sobecki: "From Russia with Love: Senator McCarthy, Sir Palomydes, and Premodern Islamophobia" 6.00 pm COFFEE BREAK 6.30 pm Denis Salter, "Ghosting in the Memory Matrix: Siddons Terry Lady Macbeth" 7.00 pm Monica Popescu: "Performing Marxism-Leninism: South Africans in the USSR" 7.30 pm Thomas Heise: "The 'Cauldron' and the 'Sewer': Mapping New York in Late-Nineteenth-Century Slumming Literature" 8.00 pm RECEPTION 20 October 2008
The 2008 Interacting with Print workshop is only a couple of weeks away. The subject of this year's workshop is 'Sociability and Print in the Long Eighteenth Century' and it will feature talks by Jane Curran (Dalhousie University), David A. Brewer (Ohio State University), Elizabeth Eger (King's College London) and Jean Boutier (École des hautes études en sciences sociales). The event takes place on Friday 7 November from 10am to 4pm in the Arts Council Room (Arts 160) at McGill University. Abstracts of the speakers' papers will be available soon on our website.19 September 2008
My article 'Lord Byron and the End of Fame' has been published in the International Journal of Cultural Studies as part of a special issue on "Celebrity, Cultural Production and Public Life" edited by Elizabeth Barry. The issue includes articles on death and celebrity in the eighteenth century, waxworks, Sherlock Holmes, Zinedine Zidane and Princess Diana. My own article sets out some of my ideas on the cultural history of celebrity for an audience interested in cultural studies, and then examines in detail one aspect of Byron's afterlife, by studying the reprinting of a stanza from Childe Harold in tourist guides, textbooks, and elocution readers. You can see the article here.25 August 2008
I've just come back from the NASSR conference on Romantic Diversity in Toronto. I organised two special sessions at the conference, called 'Diverse Legacies of Romanticism'. The presenters were Dino Felluga, Casie LeGette, Katherine Bergren, Kelvin Everest, Sarah Wootton and Karen Hadley. I was really pleased with how the sessions went - the papers were fascinating, there were interesting connections between them, and we had good questions and discussion in both sessions. The papers helped me to consider how we should think about the reception histories of Romantic writers, and showed some of the interesting work currently being done in this area. The conference as a whole was very enjoyable, and admirably organised by Dan White and the committee.14 July 2008
As it turns out, I'm reviewed twice in the current edition of The Wordsworth Circle. Immediately after Andrew Stauffer's review of Byron's Romantic Celebrity, Robert Morrison reviews the Blackwood's edition. He offers a thorough explanation of what made Blackwood's so fascinating, and concludes that "This new edition offers a wide selection of the essays, articles, poems, dialogues, and fictions that typified the early years, and comes complete with admirable introductions, detailed headnotes, thorough cross-referencing, and annotations which constantly illuminate these often densely allusive texts." The whole review is in The Wordsworth Circle 38.4 (Autumn 2007), 175-78.14 July 2008
The Wordsworth Circle has published a review of Byron's Romantic Celebrity by Andrew Stauffer. Stauffer says that the book is "anchored by a scrupulous attention to the historical and bibliographical contexts of Byron's poetry" and that "each chapter is informed by meticulous bibliographical research, and often by genuine scholarly discovery." He praises "the wonderful depth and tenacity of Mole's investigations into Byron's reception history", which he finds in "the many fine readings and scholarly contributions in evidence throughout." He has some concerns about the book's take on modern celebrity, but he concludes that "as a multi-faceted demonstration of Byron's Romantic celebrity, it is indeed an extraordinarily valuable contribution." The whole review is in The Wordsworth Circle 38.4 (Autumn 2007), 173-74. 20 June 2008
 While I was meeting with my research assistants Tara Murphy and Lauren Welsh in my office the other day, Claudio Calligaris came in and took this picture, which is currently one of several photos featured on the McGill University homepage. You can see the other campus scenes here. 20 June 2008
The Review of English Studies will publish a review of my book by Corin Throsby in the next issue. Subscribers can see an advance version here. She says: "Tom Mole offers a study of Byron's celebrity that focuses on his diverse and at times groundbreaking body of work rather than his sensational biography" and judges that the book "makes a significant contribution not only to Byron scholarship, but to the study of celebrity culture more generally". She also says nice things about the writing: "Mole writes with an effortless blend of accessibility and intellectual gravitas".17 June 2008
The papers from the 2001 Byron Conference have now appeared in a volume called Byron: Heritage and Legacy edited by Cheryl A. Wilson and published by Palgrave Macmillan. The volume includes a number of essays by an international collection of Byronists, as well as a reprint (slightly abridged) of the chapter on Hebrew Melodies from my book. The conference was held in New York City just a couple of weeks before the attacks of 11 September 2001, and some of the authors (myself included) have contributed short reflections on our visit to New York, which are published at the back of the book. You can read more here.7 April 2008
Peter Cochran has written a review of my book for the website of the International Byron Society. He especially likes the chapters on Childe Harold, and expresses some views of his own on the psychology of fandom. You can read his review here.20 March 2008
Associated University Presses have just published a collection of essays called Byron: The Image of the Poet, edited by Christine Kenyon Jones. It includes essays by Germaine Greer, Annette Peach, Peter Cochran, Geoffrey Bond and me. As a whole, I think the collection provides the fullest account to date of Byron's position in visual culture, including paintings, engravings, china figures and films. You can read more here.18 March 2008
Next week the Interacting With Print Research Group are holding a seminar aimed primarily at graduate students. John Lyon, from the University of Pittsburgh, is coming to talk about his work on Johann Caspar Lavater, whose Essays on Physiognomy were a pan-European publishing sensation at the end of the eighteenth century. The seminar is being held in conjunction with an exhibition of physiognomic texts at the Osler Library. The seminar will take place on Thursday 27 March, 2.30-4.30pm, in the Osler Library. Readings are available on the Interacting With Print website.3 March 2008
I'm going to Italy next week to take part in the Supernumerary NASSR Conference in Bologna. This will be my first opportunity to present some of the work I've been doing on the ways in which the Victorian preacher C.H. Spurgeon makes use of Byron in his sermons and writings. My paper, 'Spurgeon, Byron and the Infrastructure of Cultural Transmission' will be part of a special session on Romanticism and Book History organised by Michael Macovski.12 February 2008
Tomorrow Andrew Piper and I are taking part in a colloquium organised by the Making Publics Research Group at McGill University. The title of the colloquium is 'The End of the Early Modern Public?'. Andrew's paper is 'Overheard in Public: Women, Translation and the Permeability of Print around 1800', and my paper is 'Exposed in Public: Byron and the Legible Subject'. Nikola von Merveldt and Wes Folkerth are the respondents. The colloquium takes place on Wednesday 13 February, 4-6pm, in Ferrier 230.7 February 2008
The McGill Reporter has published an article I wrote about our modern obsession with celebrities, and why it has a longer history than most people think. The Reporter is on newsstands around campus, and is also online here. They've produced this nice image of Byron wearing wraparound shades to illustrate the article. 31 January 2008
The Byron Society of America has asked me to organise one of their two special sessions at this year's MLA Convention in San Francisco, 27-30 December 2008. The session is going to be called 'Byron and/as/in Popular Culture' and I've already been in touch with some great speakers. Here's the call for papers:The Byron Society of America is pleased to announce one of its two Special Sessions at the 2008 MLA Convention in San Francisco: Byron and/as/in Popular Culture Byron's fascination with popular culture; his representation of it; Byron as a populist; Byronic artefacts and commodities; Byron's appropriation in popular culture in his lifetime and beyond. We solicit papers on any aspect of Byron's interest in the popular culture of his time, the circulation of his works among a popular audience, and the ways in which Byron and his works were appropriated and redeployed in popular texts. Papers could address topics ranging from boxing to Luddism, texts ranging from piracies to theatrical adaptations, and artefacts ranging from gift annuals to satiric prints. Interdisciplinary or multi-media approaches are especially welcome, as are papers that pursue Byron's reception history into unexpected places. Please send 300-word abstracts to Tom Mole (tom.mole[at]mcgill.ca) by 15 March 2008. 22 January 2008
I've just returned to Montreal after a week of research in the British Library in London, where I spent most of my time looking at illustrated editions of Byron's works from the middle of the nineteenth century. While I was in London I was lucky enough to attend the launch of Adam Marek's new book of short stories, Instruction Manual for Swallowing, and Adam was kind enough to sign my copy for me. The stories are curious parables of anxiety and emotion, in which affective states and moral judgements are often rendered into literalised metaphors and memorable images. They can be sinister or nightmarish, but there's a strong undercurrent of sympathy, sensitivity and humour to them as well. Actually the humour is often more than an undercurrent, however ghoulish it seems. I enjoyed reading them a lot.14 December 2007
I'm still drumming up submissions for my special session at next year's NASSR Conference, on 'Diverse Legacies of Romanticism'. Here's the call for papers:Diverse Legacies of Romanticism Tom Mole, McGill University Papers are invited that explore the afterlives of Romanticism in any period from the 1830s to the present day, both within the academy and elsewhere. Possible topics include memorials and relics, statues and paintings, editions and anthologies, debates and controversies, theatrical adaptations, revelations and revaluations, posthumous attributions and disattributions, neglect and recovery. Especially welcome are papers that move beyond narratives of literary influence or the "critical heritage" to engage with popular, commodified or politically-engaged uses of Romanticism (including those in diverse media); papers that address the institutional connections or complicities that sustain Romantic legacies; and papers that examine the practices of citation, appropriation and redeployment that have revitalised Romanticism and given it continued (or renewed) relevance. Please submit to this special session by e-mailing Tom Mole at tom.mole[at]mcgill.ca and cc'ing the conference committee at nassr.08[at]utoronto.ca. Indicate clearly in the body of your e-mail and in your proposal the special session to which you are submitting your paper. Proposals should be 500 words and should be submitted electronically in the body of an email or as an attachment in .doc or .pdf format by January 15, 2008. 29 November 2007
Today was one of the last lectures in my class on Sociology and Materiality of Texts. The course ends where some people claim reading itself will end, with the advent of digital media. This gives me a chance to use some multi-media content in the lecture, which is something I hope to do more of in the future. I start by showing this amazing kinetic text clip, developed by researchers at Carnegie Mellon.6 November 2007
The abstracts for the Interacting with Print workshop this Friday are now available on the website. The workshop is on 9 November in the Arts Council Room (Arts 160) at McGill, starting at 10am.22 October 2007
The Interacting with Print Research Group now has its own website at http://interactingwithprint.mcgill.ca. On the site you can find details of our aims and members, the activities that we've organised so far, and those we've got lined up for the future. Our next workshop is 'Senses of Print: Interactions of Literary, Visual and Musical Print Cultures'. It takes place on 9 November in the Arts Council Room (Arts 160) at McGill. We'll officially launch the new website with a reception following the workshop.3 October 2007
I'm going to give a lecture at the University of Zurich next month, called 'Byron's Visual Celebrity'. The lecture is about the images that formed part of Byron's reception in his lifetime and for the two decades after his death. I'll be discussing paintings, prints, caricatures, graphic satires, illustrated books and a statue. While I'm in Zurich I'll also be taking part in Angela Esterhammer's seminar on Byron.2 October 2007
As promised last month, the call for papers for my special session at next year's NASSR conference has now appeared on the conference website. You can see it here, along with all the other special sessions in the conference.1 October 2007
Byron's Romantic Celebrity is officially published in North America today. You can order it directly from Palgrave USA, from Amazon.com, or, as they say, from all good booksellers.10 September 2007
I'm going to organise a special session as part of the conference of the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism (NASSR) next August. I'm interested in papers that explore the afterlives of Romanticism in any period from the 1830s to the present day, both within the academy and elsewhere. Possible topics include memorials and relics, statues and paintings, editions and anthologies, debates and controversies, theatrical adapations, revelations and revaluations, posthumous attributions and disattributions, neglect and recovery. The call for papers should come out on the conference website at the beginning of October.6 September 2007
Amazon.ca are offering my book at a discount of 37% for pre-publication orders. The book officially appears in North America at the start of October.14 August 2007
The publishers are offering my book at half price until the end of October, as part of an offer intended for members of BARS. Simply go to www.palgrave.com/bars and enter the code WBARS2007a at the checkout.11 August 2007
My book Byron's Romantic Celebrity has now been published by Palgrave in the UK. It's the latest book in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Cultures of Print series, under the general editorship of Clifford Siskin and Anne Mellor. Michael Macovski was kind enough to write the blurb. He calls it "a superb book" which "manages to recontextualize the entire concept of Romantic fame". To read more about it, click on the cover to the right. You can buy it from Amazon.co.uk or direct from the publisher. It'll be published in North America in October.3 July 2007
Next week I'm going to be in Venice for the International Byron Conference. The topic is "Byron and Identity" and I'll be giving a paper about the critique of developmental subjectivity in Don Juan. When Byron was in Venice, he swam in the Grand Canal, went pistol shooting on the Lido and had sex with so many women that it shocked even Shelley. I'm only going for a week, so I might not get round to any of these things.10 May 2007
Richard Cronin has written a wonderfully knowledgeable and balanced review of the Blackwood's edition in BARS Bulletin & Review. He says "Mole's whole volume is exemplary, and his annotation of [the Cockney School] pieces is particularly full and useful". He considers some of the annotations in depth, and concludes, "I have learned a great deal from each of the editors of these volumes and scholars of the future will build on their pioneering work."26 April 2007
Tomorrow I'm going to Ottawa, to take part in the Montreal/Ottawa Working Group on Romanticism, a terrific forum of Romanticists in the region, set up by Jon Sachs and Ina Ferris. I want to discuss some theoretical questions that arise from my new research, and to hear what everyone else is working on.19 April 2007
The Interacting with Print Research Group received a team grant from FQRSC (Fonds québécois de la recherche sur la société et la culture). It will fund our activities for the next two years.19 April 2007
A big day for the Interacting with Print Research Group. We held a planning meeting for 14 people from Montreal universities who share interests in Print Culture in the eigtheenth century, including historians, literary critics, art historians, librarians and others. We were joined by Adrian Johns, a pioneer in this field, who was visiting McGill from the University of Chicago.15 April 2007
I've been awarded a grant by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), for my project 'Imagining Byron in the Nineteenth Century'. The grant is worth about $75,000 and will support my research over the next three years.28 February 2007
Choice has published a review of the Blackwood's edition this month. Here's the conclusion: "This carefully annotated, meticulously researched set will be a delight and a valuable resource for students and researchers of early-19th-century British literature, history, and culture. Summing Up: Highly recommended."9 December 2006
I'm going to the MLA Convention in Philadelphia in a few weeks to give a paper on a panel called 'The Celebrity Culture of British Romanticism' organised by Jason Goldsmith from Butler University, with Ghislaine Mcdayter and Eric Eisner. The panel is at 12pm on Thursday 28 December, in Room 307, Philadelphia Marriott.16 November 2006
I was in Arizona last weekend for the 'Engaged Romanticism' Conference organised by Mark Lussier at Arizona State University, giving a paper called '"So still, so calm, so purely beautiful": Byron's Posthumous Rehabilitation'. It was a small but interesting conference, with a terrific plenary lecture by Alan Bewell, from the University of Toronto.25 October 2006
The research group I'm part of is organising an interdisciplinary workshop called 'Interacting with Print: Cultural Practices of Intermediality, 1700-1830' on 3 November. It's a chance for scholars in the region to share ideas about print culture in the eighteenth century. More information here.23 October 2006
I'm taking part in a symposium on 1 November called 'Literary Exchanges', jointly hosted by the departments of English and French at McGill University. My title is 'Byron, Montaigne and the Developmental Subject'. The symposium is in the Arts Council Room.11 October 2006
I'm speaking to the Montreal British History Seminar next week. My title is 'Lord Byron, The Luddites and the Framebreaking Act of 1812' and the talk is at 4.30pm on 19 October in Thomson House, McTavish Street, Montreal.11 August 2006
The Times Literary Supplement has published a review of the Blackwood's edition by Gillian Hughes.1 July 2006
The Blackwood's edition I've been working on has now been published by Pickering and Chatto - it's a snip at 495 pounds sterling for the six volumes. The edition includes poetry, prose, reviews and the noctes ambrosianae from Blackwood's early years, 1817-1825.26 April 2006
The FQRSC (Fonds québécois de la recherche sur la société et la culture) has awarded me a grant to support my research over the next three years. The project is called 'Lord Byron and the Culture of Celebrity' ('Lord Byron et la culte de la vedettariat'). |