26-28 November 2025, Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington

This joint RSAA/David Nichol Seminar conference, “Living/Building,” offered a chance to think about connections between eighteenth-century and Romantic studies, the ways lives were built and made in the 18th century and Romantic periods, and the way we live and build relationships today. The conference theme draws inspiration from Te Herenga Waka’s Living Pā, the Māori meeting house, research and teaching facility on campus. The pā is a “Living Building,” meaning that it is built to high sustainability and environmental standards, as well as reflecting Māori principles of design, learning, and community.

Keynotes: Prof Ngarino Ellis (Waipapa Taumara Rau—University of Auckland), Prof Karen Harvey (University of Birmingham), A/Prof Manu Samriti Chander (Georgetown University)

Conference organiser: Prof Nikki Hessell (Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington)

For many scholars the genre is synonymous, at the blissful dawn of its early phase, with the promise of renewed hope for humanity that the French Revolution appeared to signify. Less happily, the resumption of tyranny in the Terror could also be called a renewal of sorts. We see figures like Blake responding to both phases. Some political developments were ostensibly false starts but had great cultural significance; the 1802 Peace of Amiens, for example, was short-lived in itself, but enabled artists such as Turner to travel to Europe and gain fresh creative-impetus that would last for years. With one eye on the past, Romanticism is concerned with new ways of doing things: to many, Romanticism 101 means the rehabilitation of poetic forms in Lyrical Ballads, or the persistent themes of reconnection and revivification in Austen’s Persuasion. Yet scholarship today is much concerned with defining the genre in new ways that encompass the geographically broad, culturally diverse, and interconnected world of Romanticism. Those interested in bicentenaries will find new beginnings in 1823 – it was the year that Byron left Italy to advance the cause of Greek independence – and occasions to approach the theme more obliquely: it was also the year in which Ann Radcliffe died.

Keynotes: Professor Anna Johnston (University of Queensland), Professor Porscha Fermanis (University College Dublin), Professor Jon Mee (University of York)

Conference organisers: Chris Murray (Monash University) and Alice Capstick (University of Melbourne)

It was not until around 1800 that the generation became a properly historical category. For it was during this period that the shared experience of contemporaries—the experience, for example, of being young at the dawn of the French Revolution—emerged as a way of understanding and articulating a new sense of collective identity. As Goethe noted in his Poetry and Truth of 1811, “anybody born only a decade earlier or later might well have become a completely different person.” “Romantic” is a retrospective label, one first applied by later generations to their predecessors. “Generation,” by contrast, was a category invented by the Romantics themselves.

The Romantic Studies Association of Australasia invites proposals for papers and panels on the theme of “Romantic Generations.” The 2021 conference provides an opportunity to revisit the generations of the Romantics, and to ask what they generated. It is also an opportunity to consider the present and future of Romanticism as a critical field of historicist study. What can Romanticism generate today? What will future generations make of it?

Keynotes: Olivia Murphy (University of Sydney); Nikki Hessell (Victoria University of Wellington); Tobias Menely (University of California, Davis); Miranda Stanyon (University of Melbourne - ECR Keynote)

Conference organisers: Tom Ford, Alexis Harley, Claire Knowles (La Trobe University)

Although the body has preoccupied literary scholarship for some time, there has been a renewed attention in Romantic studies to the complex ways in which literature encodes and reproduces our awareness of embodied experience. Challenging views of Romanticism as bounded by visionary and idealist expression, such work reflects a reorientation of criticism around the materiality of Romantic culture, whether configured as part of the age of sensibility or in relation to the era’s natural and social sciences. The Romantic period was, moreover, a time when control of the body emerged as a key political issue in workshops, homes, battlefields and colonies, when bodies were subject to rapidly evolving ideas of gender, class and race, while new bodies of knowledge and corporate political bodies emerged to regulate the affairs of nations and empires. This was a period when bodies were subject to ever more intensive modes of analysis and management, at the same time that bodies imposed their transgressive physicality through new understandings of environments, vitalism, trauma, slavery, disease and taste. Attentive to such developments, Romantic studies in turn dovetails with a broader materialist emphasis that explores how bodies are shaped in relation to affect, biopolitics, speculative realism, post-humanism and eco-criticism. Alain Badiou has recently proposed that our modern, liberal ideology can today only perceive two objects: bodies and language. Aligning itself at the conjuncture of these two terms, this conference consider the way embodiment was evoked, challenged and understood in Romantic cultural life.

Keynotes: Clara Tuite (Melbourne); Peter Otto (Melbourne); Kevis Goodman (Berkeley); Will Christie (ANU); and Kevin Gilmartin (CIT)

Conference organiser: Neil Ramsay (n.ramsey@adfa.edu.au)

In the last decades of Humanities scholarship, mobility and mediation have become increasingly central, as scholars emphasised boundary-crossing rather than differentiation, movement rather than stasis, and such ideas as the porosity of individuals and communities, and a world connected in unforeseen and complex ways by the circulation of global traffic. Movements of people, objects, information, genres, and feelings, both within intimate spaces and over vast distances, have come to seem increasingly important, becoming central to work of scholars such as Celeste Langan, Alan Bewell, Mary Favret, Adela Pinch, Miranda Burgess and many others. The Romantic era provides a particularly apt site for these critical discussions because it marks the period in which a shift occurred toward thinking in terms of mobility which would become associated with modernity. Mediation contributes to the idea of mobility by suggesting liminal states, border-crossings, and negotiations, but has also been used in the work of Kevis Goodman and others to suggest the way in which Romantic literature is shaped both by the medium in which it is consumed, and by the tangential texts, disciplines, and discourses which it rubs up against. This conference aims to move between mediation and mobility, to suggest the ways in which “transport” might be understood as a range of places, motions, emotions, experiences, and reconfigurations.

Keynotes: Gillian Russell (University of Melbourne), Celeste Langan (UC Berkeley)

Conference committee: Adam Grener, Nikki Hessell, Ingrid Horrocks, Heidi Thomson

The catastrophic 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia triggered a global disaster. Blasting the top off the mountain, the eruption killed thousands and propelled masses of dust into the stratosphere where it circulated in a veil around the earth for years. One of the results was the ‘year without a summer’, with snowfalls and frosts in the summer months of 1816. The relentless bad weather inspired artists and poets, with William Turner recording the strangely spectacular sunsets in his paintings, Mary Shelley creating her apocalyptic novel Frankenstein, and Lord Byron composing ‘Darkness’.

Keynote: Clara Tuite (University of Melbourne)

Re-reading is a key practice for the humanities: it is one of the most important ways in which, on the one hand, the past is made available to the present and, on the other hand, ‘new‘ sign systems are forged. More broadly, re-reading (understood as the bivalent process sketched above) is a powerful mode of Romantic creativity and, in this guise, one of the chief ways in which modernity discovers and realises ‘various possibilities of order on the basis of an increasing freedom and a growing distance vis-à-vis an established reality‘ (Luhmann, Art as a Social System). William Blake‘s re-reading of Swedenborgian and Moravian discourses, for example, produces a sign-system (a poetic/analytic discourse) that to a surprising degree draws apart from its sources, while remaining independent of conventional semiotic repertoires existing at the time. Although the sources are different, much the same might be said of Mary Wollstonecraft, Charlotte Smith, Ann Radcliffe, Mary Robinson, William Wordsworth, and outside Britain, Olympe de Gouges, Germaine de Staël, Novalis, and many others. Romanticism itself has been the site of numerous re-readings, in which the same bivalent process can be observed; and Romanticism in its various guises continues to be re-read by important strands of contemporary culture. Most prominently, Romantic re-readings of earlier notions of imagination, passion, perception, nature, and things, exert a profound influence on, even as they are being re-read by, contemporary thought. Equally powerful forms of re-reading occur when European Romanticism crosses cultures and is read in China, India, Japan, and so on, and this is evident in the work of Rabindranath Tagore and Kenzaburo Oe, amongst many others. Seen in this light, re-reading converges with contemporary discourses of imagination, innovation, and creativity, whether deployed for politically conservative or progressive ends. Given its importance, it is surprising that so little attention is given to re-reading (as distinct from, say, intertextuality or the study of influence) and that so few accounts of re-reading engage with the bivalent process sketched above. It is our hope that ‘Re-reading Romanticism‘ will begin to redress this balance, by providing an opportunity to explore this topic and its significance for the Humanities today. The work of Marilyn Butler will be one of the foci of our discussions. Butler‘s strong re-reading of Romanticism has shaped the field we inhabit today, and this conference is intended to honour her memory.

Keynote: Jon Mee (University of York)

Conference committee: Peter Otto (University of Melbourne), Deirdre Coleman (University of Melbourne), Claire Knowles (La Trobe University)

Keynotes: Paul Giles (University of Sydney), Lydia Liu (Columbia University), Alan Bewell (University of Toronto), Peter Kitson (University of Dundee) Liam McIlvanney (University of Otago)

Conference organisers: Will Christie (University of Sydney) and Angela Dunstan (University of Kent)

The east coast of New Holland was discovered and mapped by Captain James Cook, its flora and fauna recorded and categorised by Joseph Banks and Daniel Solander, in the autumn of 1770, the same year that saw the births on the other side of the world of Wordsworth and Beethoven, making the origin and establishment of the modern Australian nation coincident with the origin and establishment of what we conventionally, if controversially, refer to as the Romantic period. This coincidence, though only one of a number of reasons for forming a confederation of Australasian Romanticists, is nonetheless a compelling one, and we invite scholars of the period from all over the world, as well as from Australia and New Zealand, to join us in marking and celebrating the foundation of the RSAA with a major scholarly event.

The theme of the conference is ‘Romanticism and the Tyrannies of Distance’, after the Australian historian Geoffrey Blainey’s now classic account of the way the geographical remoteness of Australia has shaped its history and identity. From here, it is but a small step to seeing the way in which all kinds of distance – and the will to overcome distance – conditioned and challenged the writers and thinkers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Indeed, in the spirit of new beginnings, scholars are encouraged to use the historical distance of the early twenty first century and the geographical and cultural distance of the Great South Land to reconceptualise the geographical and cultural field of Romantic studies.

Keynotes: Deirdre Coleman (Melbourne), Nicholas Roe (St Andrews), James Chandler (Chicago)

Conference organisers: Iain McCalman (Sydney), Gillian Russell (ANU), Clara Tuite (Melbourne), Jon Mee (Warwickshire)