Vote for Sarah!!

Something for the weekend? My essay on Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, thinking about sex, and who is speaking in a poem - in fine company in the very timely Ekphrasis edition of the wonderful Dilettante Army

New video out on our TikTok page about Chloe’s trip to see Frankenstein: The Musical (directed by @catherinequirk.bsky.social) at Edge Hill University last month: vm.tiktok.com/ZNdqGJcBf/

Your La Vie Parisienne cover by birth month. Some silliness from the historical periodicals for your #Friday. #c19th

Rather surprised to see a picture of myself on the TV listing! I’m not presenting it — just one of several talking heads.

Tune in to see our own @digivictorian.bsky.social on the railways 🚂

Check out our own @drbeard79.bsky.social’s essay about John Keats wanting to fuck the Grecian Urn with the brilliant Dilettante Army 🖤

Call for 2025 Hanneke Janssen Memorial Prize for best work in History &/or Philosophy of Modern Physics by a student as part of a Masters Thesis. Prize incl a 2000 euro award, invitation to give a talk at Radboud U, & publish in Foundations of Physics. Nomination by supervisor by October 6 #HPS ⚛️

Hey, Bostonians & more far-flung friends, the Novel Theory seminar I co-convene at Harvard has a cool line-up for the fall: a roundtable on the Novel in the Age of AI, Margaret Cohen on Claire de Duras, JC Cloutier on Nick Drnaso. You are so welcome to join us! (occasionally even on Zoom)

Breathtaking! Thanks to Oxford World’s Classics for making this dual edition of Mary Shelley’s ‘The Last Man’ & ‘The Journal of Sorrow’ possible & beautiful! Out in Feb in UK, May in US—in the bicentennial year of these literary masterpieces.

I really loved writing this about Austen’s best novel and hope you love it (and the novel) too! Please vote with pride and prejudice for Pride & Prejudice!!

Come and find out more about Jane Austen with our own @drbeard79.bsky.social !

CFP for Sex in the #19thC (deets in alt) Abstracts (300 words), biographies (100 words), and should be submitted on Monday 22d September 2025 to rrr @ soton.ac.uk. Please indicate if you would like to be considered for a travel bursary, and include your full name, discipline & institution.

A lovely surprise in the post today. It seems that ‘Cocaine, Literature and Culture’ is now available in paperback! @bloomsburyacad.bsky.social

You don’t have to make the not asking a man thing explicit if you’re not confident in doing so as giving the audience thinking time should encourage a wider range of questioners anyway 7/9

Research shows that if a man asks the 1st question in a panel, engagement is depressed for the rest of the Q&A so I am explicit that I won’t ask a man to ask the 1st question (no pressure, non-men!) I also clarify that after the first Q the floor is open for everyone 6/9

After everyone has presented, I think it is good practice to give the audience thinking time (and the last speaker a bit of recovery time). I tell the audience that this time is for phrasing questions grammatically with a ? tho in my old age I have softened to comments if they are generative 5/9

I love chairing panels at academic conferences and I Have Thoughts about it! I think it’s a really important service role AND you can create the conditions for everyone in the panel to have a good time AND it can be fun! A 🧵👇 1/9

Book your tickets here now: www.edgehill.ac.uk/event/franke... Please share widely, and see you in August at Frankenstein’s lab!

Hey UK-based (and willing to travel) theatre folks! If you’re not spending your life savings and every last drop of energy in Edinburgh this August, why not come to Liverpool(ish) and experience a musical theatre world premiere?

Next month: K-musical Frankenstein at Edge Hill, a co-production with Dankook U - we’re very excited for it and you should be too!!

VERY excited to be working with @broadviewpress.bsky.social (fulfilling one of my academic dreams!) on an edition of the Brontë Poems - think of the appendices!!

Really enjoyed talking Jane Austen with @19thcenturyem.bsky.social a PhD student with @ehunineteen.bsky.social - some great #JaneAustenJuly recommendations youtu.be/xeGNIo5qpds?...

@drbeard79.bsky.social, among others, heard a preview at the "Rocking Romanticism" conference that took place last year in Arras. This might also be of interest to metalheads-cum-romanticists @abdavis.bsky.social and @mjrsangster.bsky.social !

In a perhaps unusual "thrilled to announce" post for an academic... My band's first album, "Of Hope and Rage", a loose adaptation of Percy Shelley's "Masque of Anarchy" was just released! Check it out: thesetitansweresilent.bandcamp.com/album/of-hop...

I made a starter park! For the #GlobalJaneAusten conference at Southampton in July! If I’ve missed you and you want in let me know!! Also, if you want out let me know! Hoping it’ll be a way to get the most out of what looks like a great event!!

And the issue concludes with Maria Gemma Silva Ferrandez’s Review of Davy Notebooks Project, Editors: Sharon Ruston, Samantha Blickhan, Frank James, and Joanna Taylor #RoN83

Gregory O’Dea’s ‘Assembling History in Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer’ argues that the novel as we have it forms a kind of textual palimpsest, revealing stages and challenges of the historiographical process. #RoN83

Isabelle Giles’ ‘“It lives!”: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Its Theatrical Afterlife in the Nineteenth Century’ argues that the dramatisations of Frankenstein, especially Presumption, may have inspired Shelley’s revisions for the 1831 edition of the text, especially on the idea of hubris. #RoN83

Marissa W. Kopp & Suzanne E. Webster’s ‘Reframing “Harmony”: Humans as Functional Components in British Romantic Pastoral Ecosystems’ shows how the “literary pastoral” could help tackle Anthropocenic environmental crises by educating humans about their integral ecological roles on Earth. #RoN83

Here’s a thread of the other articles in the new edition of Romanticism on the Net for your perusal! #RoN83

My new article on rock, Romanticism, and Lacan is a love letter to P J Harvey AND a love letter to David Sigler, one of the editors of Romanticism on the Net whose Lacanian literary criticism inspired my own. It was fun to write and I hope you’ll enjoy reading it:

The problem with this book is that having inhaled it in one go, you soon want another and another, while excitedly telling everyone around you how good it is at extreme length.

🥳🥳🥳

Check out @drbeard79.bsky.social’s new article on Romanticism in P J Harvey’s I Inside the Old Year Dying 💃 🪩 🕺

@bathspauni.bsky.social was the first university in the UK to run a specialist class in spoken word poetry. 2025 sees its 20th anniversary 🎉 I am hosting a showcase of talent from across the years at @waterstones.bsky.social Bristol Friday 6 June with @lyrafest.com www.lyrafest.com#e126671

Fair call from citizens to the UK govt to stop arming Israel!

"Award-winning actor Juliet Stevenson has released the short film, ‘A Licence to Kill’, calling on the UK government to stop providing Israel with the weapons it uses to commit genocide against Palestinians in Gaza." www.youtube.com/watch?v=iC2L...

REMINDER - the CfP for the Global Romanticism BARS Digital Symposium is still open until Friday! For more info ⤵️ www.bars.ac.uk/blog/?p=5963

Congratulations to our PhD student @19thcenturyem.bsky.social for winning the @bars.bsky.social @chawtonhouse.bsky.social fellowship for her work in the #19thC seaside - and congratulations to the other fellows

K-Frankenstein! 🖤 🎤🧟

We’re very excited for the event of the summer: a joint production of a Korean musical adaptation of Frankenstein by Edge Hill and Dankook Universities - book your seats here: www.edgehill.ac.uk/event/franke...

Ironically, I was having a chat with my @ehunineteen.bsky.social MA students just the other day about stockpiling maple syrup 🤔 Less ironically: we’re reading Gaskell’s North and South this week which is a bit on the nose. Join the resistance, folks.

Our Research Centre @ehunineteen.bsky.social ran our annual seminar series (though one was postponed due to emergencies at the speaker’s institution): the PhD flash talks were a highlight and I love talking to Kayla Probeyahn about Wollstonecraft

Waking up on the birthday of the GOAT, Jane Austen, to see that my article with @drbeard79.bsky.social, has been published in Persuasions today to mark the date 🥳 www.jasna.org/publications...

It’s Jane Austen’s birthday today, and it would make my day - month, year! - if you ordered my books (the first on her, the second featuring her, and co-written with the fab @drbeard79.bsky.social) for yourself or your library 😊 www.peterlang.com/document/125... www.routledge.com/Reading-the-...

The editors quietly edited out a joke about refusing to tell you if the below provocation came from Reviewer 1 or 2 but I’m telling you about it cos I think it chimes with our refusal to say whether we think Noah or Howie (or Kiera Knightley or Rosamund Pike) is more attractive

We wrote ‘Adapting Jane Austen’s “Hetero Nonsense”…’ with love in our hearts for @ihatejoelkim.bsky.social and his Fire Island and hope he loves the resulting article!

It’s Austen’s birthday! Treat yourself by having a read of the new issue of Persuasions Online - published to coincide! And featuring our own @drbeard79.bsky.social & @rjdashwood.bsky.social 🥳

Anyway, student exchange programmes are good actually, end of thread 4/4