Sunday’s Tweets about NASSR 2016 via Storify

So here we are, at the end of NASSR 2016, with all of us likely traveling across the U.S. and Canada this evening, or on our way across the Atlantic or Pacific, heading back to our home institutions. Hopefully we’re re-invigorated with an exceptional amount of insight, inspiration, and innovation that will carry into our research and teaching over this coming academic year.

For me, today’s panels provided a surprising amount of vim and vigor on this, the final morning of our annual conference. When I imagine the Sunday morning of any conference, I envision a small gaggle of weary academics dragging their feet and their suitcases to the free morning coffee buffet before plopping in their seats to process, with half-closed eyelids, the final papers that our poor presenters must still deliver after the three action-packed days. To my pleasant surprise, however, both rooms were animated, engaged, and quite lively! Here’s some of what I heard… 

In a continuation of yesterday’s first Book History Caucus session, today’s roundtable on “Intersections of Manuscripts and Print” featured short presentations from Jeff Cowton, Michael Macovski, Michelle Levy, Lindsey Eckert, and Regina Hewitt. With both research and pedagogical applications, these five brilliant projects gave us all food for thought in regards to the ways that we understand (or fail to understand) the social and cultural contexts in which the texts that we read today in modern editions originally circulated at the turn of the nineteenth century.

What did a text feel like to hold and read? How was the material object originally put together? How did people correspond with one another or record their manuscript writings in notebooks? These and many other exciting queries connected their investigations.

Wordsworth Trust‘s curator Cowton first presented a wonderful powerpoint overview of the ways students and teachers are invited into Dove Cottage today to explore Romantic texts.

Students can interact with manuscripts, bind their own notebooks, produce poems inspired by the Lake District, and much more. In contrast to the activities students might do in other rare collections or in their regular classrooms, Cowton remarked that the objective at Dove Cottage is pretty clear:

We only do in Grasmere those things that you can only do in Grasmere.

Taking us further into the archives, Macovski discussed the nineteenth-century practice of counterfeiting—er, making “facsimiles.” This was a legitimate profession, apparently! Represented by the likes of John Harris, facsimilists were hired by collectors and even the British Library to remedy errors or repair missing pages from “imperfect” books in their collections. If letters, words, or entire pages were rendered unusable in some way, these skillful artists would re-create printed pages by using pen and ink and reconstructing text by hand. Macovski noted that these copies are so good that he genuinely cannot tell the difference between an original and a replication, and even the British Library had begun asking Harris to “sign” his forgeries so that they knew which ones were originals. Can you tell the difference??

Macovski’s larger theoretical implication was that these hybridized texts challenge our notions of originality, doubling, and mechanical reproduction in the era. With self-conscious identifiable markers added to the forged texts, these facsimilists were not attempting to deceive, but still created a self-reflexive layering of texts that combine into a new kind of aggregate form that defies our sense of a holistic, unified, and stable text.

Taking up this theme of textual (in)stability, Levy offered her bibliographic research on a collection of publishers’ letters from the early Victorian period. In this visual tour, she presented a new style of printed paper–the letterhead–that arose around the 1830s and destabilized what, for our period, had been a relatively consistent system of handwritten correspondence. As print began to infiltrate this previously handwritten medium, it shifted what had before been a “stable, material organism” with certain generic conventions. Nineteenth-century letterhead appeared in corporate and business contexts, and while clerks could add information within the form of the letterhead, these pages transformed the way correspondence functioned by depersonalizing and formalizing a previously personal, intimate form of communication. Shifting the boundaries between public and private, these new half-script/half-printed letterheads reflected larger cultural shifts, Levy suggests.

Fortunately, Cowton had brought with him a handout that served well to illustrate the handwritten letters that Levy was discussing!

Next up was Eckert’s work on book binding, an aspect of book history that has remained relatively tangential in the field. She’s been examining almanacs, which were often circulated in cheap 1-shilling versions but sometimes owners opted to bind them singly or together.  When these material objects were bound specifically for individual users, one can discern much from that reader’s desire to have the original documents preserved. As with Macovski’s and Levy’s projects, Eckert noted the importance of annotations and alterations that readers would frequently make to the texts, adding to and amending the almanacs in order to create what she called an “ephemeral ethos” in which such annotations challenge the notion that a text might act as a stable repository of information. Eckert traces an “intentionality of resistance” in this willingness to test and adapt the information found within these bound volumes. Follow Eckert on Twitter for more on book-binding research!

Last but not least, ERR‘s co-editor Hewitt rounded off the presentations with some theoretical applications of these #bookhistory investigations. She suggested some ways in which life-writing intersected with the shift from mansucript to print states. She argued in particular that utopian inquiry engaged the reader of a printed text and operated through a mode of educational desire in which the recipient of the text imagines how he or she would act if his or her life were unfolding in a different world. Thus the printed text inspires a new narrativization of the self, inviting readers to re-narrativize themselves through these imagined parallel lives, especially in the genre of the Bildungsroman.

Moderator Nick Mason led a dynamic Q&A session in which the panelists discussed the future of book history as a field. With the sheer quantity of data left to be explored, much wide-open territory remains for scholars to engage in this work, and it shows no sign of slowing down. And with increasing digitization of resources and greater ease of access to facilities like those at Dove Cottage–where, as Cowton noted, you no longer need to have iron-clad references to get in the doors of the Jerwood Centre–we have even more exciting work to look forward to.

In summary – here are some key takeaways I gathered from the Book History roundtable:

• This dynamic field of inquiry is now challenging notions of the text as an original, holistic, stable, and consistent entity.
• The texts we study, whether poems or letters, were in many ways layered, hybridized documents, like primitive versions of a hypertext today. They were both interactive and changeable, with annotations and corrections made by hand often changing the original state of a printed object.
• People liked writing in their books. A lot.
• And most importantly: Understanding the material object makes students “better citizens of the world. Period.” (credit: Lindsey Eckert)

Tomorrow, I’ll post on the Pedagogy Contest panel, hosted by Romantic Circles, which had interesting overlaps with this book history panel and was, for me, perhaps the most useful hour-and-a-half out of the entire conference! But for now, off to bed…

One of the last panel slots of NASSR 2016 was reserved for a roundtable with contestants of the Romantic Circles‘s Pedagogy Contest, hosted by RC Pedagogies editor Kate Singer. This year’s competition featured these finalists:

• Simon Bainbridge (Lancaster University) – “Wordsworth Online and On Location: Teaching Romantic Writing Beyond the Literature Classroom”
• Michelle Levy (Simon Fraser University) with Alex Grammatikos (Carleton) and Kandice Sharren (Simon Fraser) – “Remediating Lyrical Ballads”
• Lauren Neefe (Georgia Tech) – “Romanticism’s Social Media”
• Tristram Wolff (Northwestern) – “Poetics of Stone”

In general, I was floored (and, to be honest, a little intellectually intimidated) by the pedagogical innovations on display yesterday. And while Wolff was unfortunately unable to present, I was excited that the remaining panelists and audience would have plenty of time for the presentations plus a vibrant lengthy Q&A discussion session to round off the entire conference. Here’s more:

Simon Bainbridge walked us through two courses that Lancaster has been running for non-traditional learners. The first is a four-week online course that’s open to the general public. “Wordsworth: Poetry, People, and Place” offers a series of informative videos that introduce students to Grasmere and surrounding locales, while Brainbridge and fellow scholars explain the basics of Romantic poetry, Wordsworth, his circle, and his compositional sites and practices. The course focuses on conveying the importance of location to Wordsworth’s creative work.

Virtually connecting students to the poet’s home turf, this interactive course stimulates learning with a variety of tools, like reading assignments and discussion boards, some of which collected hundreds of responses. Post-graduate students act as mentors for the online students and facilitate learning by responding to questions and giving advice to participants, and at the end of each week the faculty create another film in which they provide a collective response to some of the central discussion topics from the week’s boards. A Google hangout with the Worsdworth Trust finishes off the whole course.

The other project was Wordsworth Walks, which involve one-day learning experiences to get people reflecting on their own paths in life by tracing Wordsworth’s steps. As the website summarizes:

Wordsworth Walks offer a unique, one-day developmental experience, suitable for individuals, companies and organisations. Built around a guided three-mile walk of Wordsworth country (Rydal and Grasmere in the Lake District), these walks use the landscape, the poet’s work and a series of practical exercises and physical activities to provide a framework in which participants can reflect on their own development, values and plans for the future.

These hikes, which have tended to attract MBAs and other leadership types, focus on developing three themes: reflection, vision, and working with others. Using Wordsworth’s “spot of time” model, students are asked to reflect on their own past; climbing into the dark recesses of Rydal cave, they’re inspired to contemplate a vision for their futures; on a canoeing trip out to Grasmere island, they learn about the importance of cooperation and collaborative work with others–thinking about how they might, back in their own corporate worlds, be a “Coleridge” to someone else’s “Wordsworth.” (Bainbridge promises they cast this supportive, partnering dynamic in a purely positive light!) 

With more than 5,000 learners participating from 60 countries, these courses have had immense success. And while I’m not sure that I like the idea of hundreds of corporate MBAs traipsing across Grasmere imagining that they can embody the Wordsworthian experience in a day (which, of course, was a relatively solitary experience, even if Dorothy and Samuel were by William’s side), I appreciate the effort to expose a general public to the values of Romantic literature and its ethos of meditative tranquility.

Returning us back to a traditional classroom setting, Michelle Levy presented (directly after her work on the book history roundtable!) along with Ph.D. students Sharren and Grammatikos on Levy’s graduate seminar at Simon Fraser. In her course “Remediating Lyrical Ballads,” eight students undertook the project of publishing an online digital edition of the 1798 Lyrical Ballads, on a website complete with introductory materials for each of the 23 poems as well as a history of the material circumstances of publication, including binding, paper, collation, errata, and more. All of this supplementary content on the website stems from students’ individual research projects. Check out the entire site here.

The point of the course, as Levy, Grammatikos, and Sharren explained, was to push the limits and expectations of a traditional graduate seminar while invoking the collaborative and experimental spirit behind the original Ballads.  While they encountered a variety of technological and logistical struggles along the way, it seems that this learning experience was immensely valuable for all. In particular, they gained critical editorial expertise as well as a range of DH skills such as XML coding, which grad students typically would not have had exposure to elsewhere. In their writing for the website, students considered how to balance their prose so that it would be both accessible to the general public as well as useful and insightful for the scholar–a dual stylistic skill that would behove any of us to hone.

Following introductory material, each poem is presented with a digital scan and a transcription:

As the digital humanities and, in general, digital editions and archives begin to infiltrate our once paper-devoted field, it seems that learning these kinds of hands-on (er…keyboard-on?) skills is an invaluable asset to graduate students, and I hope more faculty will begin bringing such collaborative efforts into the seminar classroom.

From graduate students to undergrads, we turned finally to Lauren Neefe’s first-year composition class for technologically-savvy students at Georgia Tech, where freshman “English” classes are not literary so much as linguistic–students are asked not to study any fiction, per se, but rather to work within a range of multimodal writing aimed at teaching students how to make arguments, not necessarily how to read novels or poems. In what for many of us would thus be an atypical setting, Neefe has found ways to harness the technical prowess of her students to create a unique learning experience.

In “Romanticism’s Social Media,” Neefe divides her course into three units with three coinciding projects that ask students to do a variety of exciting tasks, including:

• Put together a 3-minute lecture that explains, using Romantic “media theory,” what one of the Romantic writers studied would say today about a social media platform (Kant takes down his Facebook page; Charles Lamb is sad you don’t read his blog)
• Create a broadside sheet (with paper that they made themselves in Georgia’s paper museum, and using relief-printing techniques!) that documents a public reading that they had to imagine taking place for either “Eve of St. Agnes” or “Christabel”
• After reading Emma, propose a new social media platform that would serve the community of Highbury (Twitter for gossip-mongers, anyone?!)

In support of these creative endeavors, students had to provide written artist’s statements and other supplementary materials that explained and justified their choices. Neefe’s Prezi presentation showed some incredible products of which, unfortunately, I don’t have images to show you–but trust me, these students pulled out all the stops!

With these three phenomenal courses in mind, the audience provided lots of feedback and questions, including issues around:

• socioeconomic disparity among students (what do we do when students don’t have easy access to computers and other resources?)
• technological knowledge on the part of the instructor (can we be humble enough to trust our students and learn along with them?)
• grading (how do we, as literary-trained instructors, evaluate creative, multimodal, and artistic projects?)
• outcomes and takeaways for students (what are these projects teaching students when content, and even traditional forms of writing, is not the priority?)

Even though these courses diverged in their pedagogical approaches and products, two key themes rose to the surface here: Collaboration and Community. Like good Romantics, both students and their professors discovered that they could achieve much more together than alone. In the various collaborative modes represented here, whether it involved students responding to one another on an online discussion board or teaching one another XML coding or making paper together for a set of broadsides, each of these courses opened up a stimulating intellectual community that taught students more than they bargained for in a class on poetry—and, undoubtedly, formed precisely the kind of close-knit intellectual community that Wordsworth and his Grasmere pals would have fondly recognized.

I grew up in Toronto, but having lived on the west coast for the last five years, for me, one of the highlights of this year’s Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (CSECS-SCEDHS) conference was the chance to see snow! The conference was held in Kingston, Ontario, from October 26–30, 2016, and was sponsored by Queen’s University and the Royal Military College of Canada. I watched the weather change from sunny and clear to grey and snowy on the train from Toronto to Kingston, and the stormy skies in Kingston were a fitting backdrop for the conference’s theme of Secret/s & Surveillance.

Like last year’s conference in Vancouver, though, the atmosphere inside the hotel was convivial rather than foreboding, marked by collegiality rather than paranoia. CSECS is friendly to graduate students, offering a welcoming place to share our work as well as generous travel bursaries. It has a national graduate representative—Catherine Nygren—and a local one––Katie Hunt. They held a lunch for grad students that promised “Free Lunch and Wise Conversation,” according to the program, with a panel of deans, fellows, and librarians. They also hosted a fun, more informal, grad student get-together at a local pub.

As a Romanticist, I felt a little out of place: most of the papers seemed to focus on the early part of the century, although there was a panel on Romantic Voices and two on Austen: one on Emma, and one with a general Austen theme. As is typical of good conferences, there were more enticing papers than there was time to hear them all, but the highlights for me were Betty Schellenberg’s “Hidden Worlds of Reading: The Parallel Literary Universe of the Eighteenth-Century Personal Miscellany,” Katherine Binhammer’s “The Character of Debt,” Tom Keymer’s “Jane Austen’s Teenage Writings: Amusement, Effusion, Nonsense,” and David Richter’s “Becoming Jane, Miss Austen Regrets, and the Cultural Mythology of the Biopic.”

Next year’s conference CFP has not yet been released, but it will be held in Toronto, Ontario, from October 18–22. And who knows? It might even snow.

Every day during this year’s conference, one or more NASSR grads will post a recap of the day’s events. Many delegates are livetweeting, so we’re also using Storify to capture each day’s highlights.

Storify Recap

https://storify.com/EditrixCaroline/nassr-2017-day-one

Stephanie Edwards’ Recap

As a NASSR conference newbie, my first day of this year’s conference was a haze of drinking coffee, attempting to subtly read nametags, and writing feverishly in my notebook. Above all, though, today provided me with an overwhelming amount of generative and invigorating scholarship and a chance to listen to the exciting new work being done by many Romantic critics who I have admired for a long time. From this morning’s panel, “Plant Love and Vital Sparks: Materialism, Vitalism, and Erasmus Darwin,” in which paper topics ranged from the ambiguity of electricity in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to the sexual politics of Blake’s amaryllis, to the panel that closed out my day, “Feeling/Less/Life,” where David Clark, Lubabah R. Chowdhury, and Jonathan C. Williams provided an absolutely fascinating discussion on the aesthetics of death, each panel I attended either increased my interest in an already-familiar branch of scholarship or alerted me to new areas and ideas that left me wanting to spend the night getting cozy with the MLA Bibliography.

However, my favourite panel of the day had to be Sara Landreth’s (who presented a wonderful paper on fidgeting earlier that morning) expertly curated roundtable: What Moves Romanticism? Or, What can 18th- and 19th-Century Studies Do with Affect, Emotion, Feeling, Passion, (In)Sensibility, Sentiment, Sympathy, &c.? Borne somewhat out of last year’s NASSR Berkeley seminar titled “Affect: Enough Already!,” Landreth’s roundtable focused on the role that affect theory plays in our methodological, pedagogical, and critical practices within Romanticism. Participants were asked to grapple with and respond to the chiasmic relationship between 18^th– and 19^th-century studies and affect theory, especially in regards to the ways that it inflects and inspires their own work in the field.

Gena Zuroski opened up the discussion with some audience participation, asking us whether or not we consider de Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater to be a funny text. This question led into an inspiring dialogue about affect’s pedagogical potential where, although Zuroski and her students cannot know for certain what made writers and readers laugh in the 18^th and 19^th centuries, the funniness these texts evoke in 21^st-century classrooms is undoubtedly meaningful as part of the learning process. Philosophy and literary criticism took centre stage next as Wendy Lee suggested that affect theory may provide new ways of linking the two often disparate disciplines. Lee wondered whether affect theory is not, in fact, actually a version of philosophical truth-seeking and how this reconsideration of affect theory can open up fresh approaches in branches like psychoanalysis and analytical philosophy. Miranda Burgess (whose work on feeling and mobility inspired much of my own MA thesis and who I was, admittedly, a little star struck to hear speak) detailed how a feeling-oriented approach to Romantic writing can generatively substitute affect for emotion as a major object of study. Continuing on, Burgess admits that she finds this substitution attractive due to its ability to place affect within conversations of flows and openness rather than restricting it to internality and expulsion. Alice den Otter then directly took up the question of what moves Romanticism, outlining the trajectory of scholarship on Anna Barbauld and concluding that affect, in relation to Romantic criticism in general, materializes itself through a widening of previously constrictive generic and gendered boxes into a more complex, holistic understanding of what Romantic authors can offer us today. To close out the roundtable, conference organizer extraordinaire Julie Murray brought us back to the affective trauma of her PhD dissertation, where her work on discourses of passion and emotion brought her to the consideration of whether Joanna Baille’s anachronistic affect was inherently modern or antiquated.

So what was my own affective response to this roundtable? One of the most exciting aspects about roundtables, for me, is the ways that each response to a prompt or theme can be so varied yet so interconnected at the same time. On this note, today’s discussions left me with a feeling of inspiration and encouragement to find the ways that affect theory, and the approaches outlined in this roundtable, can flow and inspire my own future forays into Romantic scholarship.

Caroline Winter’s Recap

NASSR 2017 is off to a wonderful start! This is my first time at NASSR, so I wasn’t sure what to expect, but today was full of thought-provoking panels and inspiring discussion. I noticed over the course of the day that many of the sessions I attended touched upon the idea of intellectual community.

I started the day at the Friends and Neighbours Panel, which got me thinking about sociability and how the people and things surround us shape the way we understand and interact with the world. Each paper had a different take on the notion of neighbours: Natasha Duquette spoke about the Lunar Society, an organized social and intellectual group;  Wayne C. Ripley spoke about the impromptu community of Blake’s neighbourhood; and Jacob Henry Leveton discussed the Albion Mill as an inanimate neighbour of Blake’s. Such discussion of community seems especially appropriate on the first day of the conference, when newcomers like me are surrounded by friends and colleagues who meet here every year, and whose work is shaped by our shared intellectual community.

Carrying on the theme of community, the next panel I attended was the Roundtable on Public Humanities. Two main ideas emerged out of our discussion: first, the humanities is changing; and second, collaboration is the way forward–collaboration with our students, with the public, and with scholars in other disciplines.

After lunch, I went to another roundtable: What Moves Romanticism? A key takeaway for me was an idea that came up in the Public Humanities session too: that empathy is, in our political moment, indispensable, and that Romantic studies is particularly attuned to its importance.

My own panel followed, and I’m grateful for the thoughtful questions and discussion that followed, as well as the technical support.

The notion of community seemed an appropriate theme for the day that ended with the welcome reception up in the penthouse, with its beautiful view of the city.

Now, on to day two!

Storify Recap

goo.gl/72nGe6

Caroline Winter’s Recap

I started the day by chairing a wonderful panel on Affect and Economics. I was especially excited about this since I’m working on Romantic economics myself. It was lovely to hear about the work that others are doing in this area, and it made me wonder what became of New Economic Criticism? I’ve heard a lot of this kind of criticism pop up in various contexts throughout the conference, but we don’t seem to see it as a coherent strand of criticism, and I’m not sure why.

Another highlight of my day was co-chairing the NGSC Professionalization panel, the theme of which was Survival. Our wonderful panellists–Devoney Looser, Vivasvan Soni, Eugenia Zaroski, and Ian Newman–offered advice and answers to our questions about things like keeping up with all the new work in our field, establishing a writing practice, and entering the job market when academic is your second career. My takeaway from the session was that, confirming my own experience, it’s really important to not let your academic life consume you: find something else that you love to do, and don’t neglect your relationships with friends and family.

My next stop was Devoney Looser’s seminar on Jane Austen at 200, which took the form of a group discussion. We talked a lot about navigating the divide between the “bonnet crowd” and Austen scholarship, and some (including me) voiced our frustration about not being taken seriously as Austen scholars because we also love the work we’re studying.

Robert Mitchell’s wonderful keynote about regulation closed out the day. Onto Day 3!

Storify Recap

goo.gl/vGGC8h

Stephanie Edwards’ Recap

Day three of the NASSR conference, for me, signaled the beginning of a shift in my conference-going interests. On Friday, I attended the roundtable on Romanticism after Black Lives Matter, a roundtable that I plan to discuss at length in my conference postmortem blog post. What is important in the context of day three, however, is how that roundtable influenced what panels I attended today. I decided this morning that I would attend all (possible) panels that featured a paper on a writer of colour or that dealt with issues of race. This decision not only enriched my overall conference experience but brought forth some of the most engaging papers and Q&A discussions of the week.

The first panel, “The Politics of Life,” looked like it may be off to a rough start, with two out of three panelists unable to attend; however, Deanna Koretsky easily made the panel a standout with her paper “Impossible Life: Equiano’s Black Ecology.” Weaving together the parahuman, sea creatures, and suicide, Koretsky provided a sobering look at Equiano’s narrative. I feel that I cannot adequately summarize Koretsky’s intricate argument nor easily convene the impact that it had on me, at both the personal and scholarly level. However, I can quickly mention one major lesson that I learned, a lesson I will be discussing in greater length in my future post: that, although it may perhaps be met with institutional and collegial resistance, it is crucial for us to start interrogating the work that we do, the definitions of our discipline, and the methodologies we inhabit.

The final panel I attended today brought me the pleasure of hearing Atesede Makonnen’s prize-winning paper, “‘Our Blackamoor or Negro Othello’: Rejecting the Affective Power of Blackness.” Makonnen’s thorough and beautiful takedown of Kant, Coleridge, Hazlitt, and Lamb, in regards to their racist remarks about black affectivity on the stage, may end up being my favourite moment of the conference. Additionally, she, like Koretsky, increased my awareness about racial problems that found their footing during the Romantic era; in this case, the Romantic era birthed the first major occurrence of the whitewashing we are so familiar with in the media today.

Day three ended with a bang in the form of Mary Favret’s elegant, layered, yet accessible keynote on Mary Wollstonecraft and Antigone. Now, I’m off to prepare for day four and my own panel presentation!

Storify Recap

goo.gl/i1AV1i

Stephanie Edwards’s Recap

Day four of the conference was, undoubtedly, the most exciting for me since it was the day of my own panel. Before my mid-morning panel, I heard some interesting and unique papers at “The Life of Things.” Brianna Beehler’s paper, “Frankenstein’s Doll: Production Narratives, Animation, and the Novel,” offered a really cool and fresh approach to reading Frankenstein as a doll narrative, with the Creature moving from doll to doll player. As a huge fan of Frankenstein, I was very excited to think about my beloved text in a new way.

Selfishly, however, my favourite panel of the day was my own, “Gendered Affects,” and not just because I got to introduce a room full of people to Sara Coleridge and her amazing work. I had the pleasure of sharing the panel with Alice den Otter, my undergraduate supervisor, whose patience and encouragement I owe deeply for much of my success as a graduate student. It was a great experience to present alongside her and to offer her some support in return. Additionally, Hannah H. Markley gave a paper about Dorothy Wordsworth, excrement, and emotional constipation that captivated and intrigued everyone in attendance.

Overall, I had a really wonderful time at my first NASSR conference and I want to thank Julie Murray, Lauren Gillingham, and the entire NASSR Ottawa team for making it such a great experience. I never saw you working the entire time I was there and that, to me, shows how hard everyone worked prior to the conference and behind-the-scenes while it was going on. I’m sure I speak for all the attendees when I say that I appreciate all the effort that goes into running a conference of this size and am sending you an internet round of applause.

Until next year, NASSRites. See you in Providence!

Atesede Makonnen is the winner of the 2017 NASSR Graduate Student Paper Prize. She is starting her second year as an English PhD student at Johns Hopkins University (MA in Shakespeare Studies, King’s College London, BA, Dartmouth College). Her research examines performance and race. Her winning paper will be published in the conference issue of European Romantic Review.

Sede, you were awarded the Graduate Student Paper Prize at the NASSR 2017 conference in Ottawa. Congratulations! Could you tell me about your paper?
Thank you so much! The paper looks at a particular moment in the stage history of Othello when the titular character’s race had to be re-imagined due to the social climate. Racialized philosophy and science, British abolition, slave revolts, looming integration – during all of this, a black Othello became problematic, specifically because of his affective power.

What inspired you to write this? Where did the idea come from?Last year, I happened to take two classes in one semester that dovetailed perfectly – Professor Mary Favret’s “Romanticism and the Ends of Affect” and Professor Mark Christian Thompson’s “The Enlightenment, Aesthetics and Race.” I ended up thinking about towering philosophical figures like Kant, Adam Smith, and Edmund Burke from two perspectives. Shakespeare is always in the back of my mind – during my MA, I wrote a paper on the editing of Othello which first introduced me to Coleridge’s thinking on race and Edmund Kean’s 1814 debut of a ‘tawny’ Moor. I became interested in how the aesthetics of race crossed over with affect around the figure of Othello and blackness as a whole in Romantic life.

What are some of your other research interests? How does this paper fit into your larger research project/thesis?
This paper is a starting point for me into a hopefully larger project continuing to think about race on the romantic stage and what it meant and continues to mean for theatrical history (and beyond). The next step is looking at illustrations of Edmund Kean and portraiture of Ira Aldridge. I’ve been thinking about race, specifically blackness, in the media quite a bit. I’m working on a paper about the Oscars and another on whitewashing.

How was your overall experience at the conference? Which was your favourite panel?
It was good and very informative! I met many excellent scholars and very kind people. My favorite panel was probably “The Politics of Life” – Deanna Koretsky’s paper “Impossible Life: Equiano’s Black Ecology” was great.

Did you find time to get away from the conference and explore the city during your stay in Ottawa?
I have to admit, pre-panel nerves meant I spent quite a while staring at my paper and powerpoint and less time exploring. However, it was my first trip to Canada and I did make sure to explore at least a little bit – I tried a beaver tail, walked past Parliament, and took lots of pictures!

Finally, do you have any tips for other grad students about writing successful conference papers?
Let go. I had the hardest time selecting what I would and wouldn’t include in this paper. I was really stubborn about accepting that it had to get cut down – in the end, I think it was really good for my thought process to streamline what was most important.

Congratulations again, Sede, and thank you for telling us about your research. I’m looking forward to reading your paper in ERR!

Dr. Nikki Hessell is a co-winner of this year’s NASSR/Romantic Circles Pedagogy Contest, as announced at NASSR 2017 in Ottawa. Nikki is a Senior Lecturer in the School of English, Film, Theatre and Media Studies at the Victoria University of Wellington. She’s been kind enough to tell us about her submission and share some tips for graduate students on teaching Romanticism.

Caroline Winter: Hello, Nikki. Thank you for sharing your insights with us for the NGSC blog, and congratulations on your award! Could you tell us about your submission?

Nikki Hessell: Thanks Caroline, and thanks again to the organisers of the NASSR/Romantic Circles Pedagogy Contest. My submission was for a fourth-year course on Romanticism and Indigeneity. The course starts with some thinking and reading about the literary forms that already existed in countries like mine (Aotearoa New Zealand), throughout Te Moana-Nui-a-Kiwa (the Pacific Ocean), and across Turtle Island (the US and Canada). It then thinks about how the British Romantic authors responded to those traditions and the people making those works, and how indigenous authors in those places in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries responded to the Romantic literature they encountered through forced or voluntary experiences in colonial education systems.

Caroline: That sounds amazing! What motivated you to develop this particular course?

Nikki: That’s a big question with lots of sides to it. I could talk about this for a long time, but I’ll try to give a short summary.

1. I’d like to see more indigenous students studying English literature, but there’s no point just saying that, even sincerely, and then sitting back and waiting for it to happen. What is our field doing to make studying literature (Romantic literature especially) as interesting and relevant as, say, studying law, or health sciences, or education, or history?
2. Romantic studies is well-equipped to make a contribution, since our period overlaps with a the era of imperial expansion and because the literature itself is so engaged with indigeneity. But we need to talk about colonisation from within colonised cultures, not simply as something the British did.
3. Like most Pākehā (white settler) scholars and teachers, I’ve had to think long and hard about my role here, especially in terms of appropriation. But I’ve come to believe that it is better to use my expertise and my position to create conditions for a new generation of scholars to replace me. The only way to find those scholars is to be willing to train them. And the political situation in Aotearoa means there is considerably more enthusiasm and understanding in an institution like mine than in other parts of the colonised world, so I thought it might be useful to NASSR if I took a leadership role in this area of our field.

Caroline: How does this course fit into your larger research project or areas of interest?

Nikki: My main area of research interest is the intersection of Romanticism and indigeneity, so this is a perfect fit! As my answer above probably indicates, it’s taken me a while to think through the ethical and pedagogical issues of such a course. But working on my forthcoming book (Romantic Literature and the Colonised World: Lessons from Indigenous Translations, Palgrave 2018) has given me years to consider the ways in which Romanticism and indigenous epistemologies interacted from the Romantic period onwards, and also to develop my own skills to be a useful teacher in this area. I’m at work on a new project that will influence the course as well.

Caroline: How did students respond to the course? What was it like to teach it?

Nikki: That remains to be seen! I developed it just in time for the NASSR 2017 conference, and it will be offered in the next cycle of fourth year courses at my institution. But I have taught parts of the course in other contexts already, as I’ve been developing them, and the response has been very positive. One student told me that they felt like the understood modern New Zealand better for understanding the connections between Romanticism and colonial experience, and that was part of what I was hoping students would see. I’m particularly looking forward to taking students to the marae (meeting house) for some of our class time.

Caroline: Please send us an update; I’d love to know how it goes. What advice do you have for graduate students who are developing their own Romanticism courses?

Nikki: Remember that developing as a teacher is a lifelong experience: you don’t have to solve all of the challenges of Romantic pedagogy today. There’s real value in being able to teach what we might think of as a standard Romantic literature course, and there are almost always opportunities within that course for discussion of how the field is changing and where it’s headed. Your own research interests can help change the way even very familiar texts get read in the classroom.

Caroline: Romanticism is such as broad, interdisciplinary field that it can feel overwhelming even thinking about where to start, so this is great advice. Thanks again for telling us about the course and your research.

Throughout the weekend, we will be having some guest bloggers share their experiences at NASSR’s 2018 conference. Today, Alicia McCartney takes us through a wide array of panels in her recap of day one of the conference!

If you are at #NASSR18 and would like to contribute a post, please get in touch with Stephanie Edwards, our Managing Editor, at edwars10@mcmaster.ca

My NASSR2018 experience began, perhaps aptly, with discussions about the end of the world.  The first panel of the day, “Mary Shelley’s Ends,” featured Jennifer Hargrave, Jamison Kantor, and Chris Washington discussing Shelley’s The Last Man and Frankenstein. Pathology, quantum physics, apocalypse, and critique of empire all played a large role in this conversation, and Hargrave in particular observed that The Last Man demonstrates a complex critique of the imperialist/colonial shift.

Next, “Wordsworthian Bicentennials” offered the opportunity to learn about Dorothy’s pioneering ascent up Scafell Pike, the highest mountain in England, in October 1818, and the scheduled commemorative reenactment of her walk being coordinated this autumn. Paul Westover noted that Dorothy, at age 46 (only a few years before she began to suffer serious health issues) hadn’t planned to make the summit, but she felt strong and kept going. The trail she described was reproduced in multiple nineteenth-century tourist guidebooks, and Dorothy is largely the reason that path turned from a traditional shepherds’ route to a popular fell walk.

Peter Manning discussed Wordsworth’s self-fashioning in Miscellaneous Poems (1820), demonstrating how the poet anthologized his earlier, more radical work. Wordsworth contextualized this “juvenile” work in an attempt to project continuity with his turn to more conservative poetic and political forms, depicting himself as a “locally rooted patriot” and a “responsible steward of the poetic tradition,” and even as a “new Milton.” This self-fashioning nevertheless was incomplete and opened him up for critiques from the second generation of Romantics.

Finally, Jeff Cowton, curator of the Wordsworth Trust, discussed both #Wordsworth250 and the #ReimaginingWordsworth projects. Cowton encouraged us to think through the ways that Wordsworth’s poetry is still relevant, and the ways that audiences from people with MS to refugee groups have interacted with Wordsworth’s poetry to contemplate, access, refract, and express their own experiences in place. I’m not doing this project justice, but it’s worth exploring the exciting developments happening in Grasmere.

After lunch, “Black and Brown Romanticisms” offered the opportunity to revisit Mary Shelley, as Deanna Koretsky provided an analysis of Shelley’s Mathilda and interracialism. Doris Smith’s paper on the reception history of Phillis Wheatley challenged the ways Wheatley has been read as a fragment herself, rather than as a poet in her own right and a theorist of the fragmentary. What if we approached Wheatley through the lens of Romantic poetic genius? How would that transform both our understanding of her work and our pedagogy? Lastly, Lubabbah Chowdhury presented on anti-blackness in Indo-Caribbean writer V.S. Naipaul, pointing out that his interest in history rather than politics is political.

The final panel I attended was “Thinking Through Austen.” Magdalena Ostas, Benjamin Parker, and Yasmin Solomonescu all gave thought-provoking papers, but it was in the Q&A most of all that their observations about free indirect discourse both diverged and coalesced. Ostas’s paper in particular modeled a pedagogy that challenges students to see the multiple perspectives inherent in an apparently simple sentence in Persuasion — “She was only Anne Elliot” —which could be attributed to up to eight characters in the novel, and which changes meaning depending on whose consciousness the narrator is channeling. “This panel has made me a better reader of Austen,” remarked a colleague afterwards, and I have to agree.

This is why I go to conferences: the wonder of hearing the questions others ask— questions I wouldn’t have thought of, questions that challenge me to approach a text in a new way, questions that make me realize and articulate my existing interpretive frameworks. And, sometimes, these questions are strikingly like my own, leading to that wonderful moment of scholarly resonance (“What? You care about this stuff, too?”).

The plenary lecture by William Keach, “Romantic Writing and the Determinations of Cultural Property,” entailed another moment of recognition, as he contextualized places in Rome I’d visited as an undergraduate within the experiences of Shelley and Byron, discussing the poets’ respective interactions with, and avoidance of, the multi-layered cultural history and ownership of Roman “ruins.” I recognized that I’d experienced these same ruins without realizing the layers of literary history that now overlays them, as well.

And, at the end of a long day, the opening night reception, generously sponsored by SEL, did not disappoint. The hors d’oeuvres were good, the conversation was better, and I’m pleased to call day one a success.