December 7, 2018, by Sunita Tailor

#2 Introducing some of the keynote speakers

In this second blog post in the BARS 2019 Nottingham series, we’re introducing two of the keynote speakers for this conference: Professor Sharon Ruston and Professor Jane Stabler.  We also asked them which part of the BARS 2019 conference they were most looking forward to, and what interests them the most about the conference’s theme ‘Romantic Facts and Fantasies’…

Professor Sharon Ruston

Sharon Ruston is Chair in Romanticism at Lancaster University. She is the author of Shelley and Vitality (Palgrave, 2005), Romanticism: An Introduction (Continuum, 2007), and Creating Romanticism: Case Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine in the 1790s (Palgrave, 2013); co-editor of The Routledge Research Guide to the Literature and Science of the Nineteenth Century (2017); co-editor of Teaching Romanticism (Palgrave, 2010); editor of a special issue of Essays and Studies on ‘Literature and Science’ (2008); and the co-editor of The Collected Letters of Sir Humphrey Davy and his Circle (http://www.davy-letters.org.uk/) to be published in four volumes by OUP in 2019.

“I’m really looking forward to seeing old friends (some of whom have been going to the conference for as long as I have and even longer). This is a bit strange, but I always quite look forward to the BARS AGM at the conference. I used to be on the executive committee many years ago and it’s nice to see how the society has grown and developed since then.”

Professor Jane Stabler

Jane Stabler is Professor in Romanticism and Head of the School of English at the University of St Andrews, Scotland.  Her books include Byron, Poetics and History(2002) and The Artistry  of Exile: Romantic & Victorian Writers in Italy (2013). In 2014-17 she held a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship to work on the Don Juan volume of the Longman Annotated English Poets edition of Byron. This seven-volume edition is scheduled for completion in 2037.

“I am really looking forward to hearing he papers by the next generation of Byronists – always very exciting to learn what new PhD projects are getting underway. I told Lynda that I liked the topic because it reminded me of the terms of a brilliant Nottingham Byron Lecture given (and then published) by Anne Barton on ‘Byron and the Mythology of Fact’ – she compares and contrasts the ways Byron and Keats navigate material reality and the realm of imaginative fantasy. It’s an essay I still recommend to undergraduates.”

We look forward to introducing the other keynote speakers, Professor Laura Mandell, Dr Robert Poole, and Professor Diego Saglia, in a later post!

 

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