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Bristol is the city of the English Romantic movement. The University’s 1998 conference, Bristol: Romantic City, comprehensively demonstrated the significance of Bristol cultural life to Romantic culture, broadly conceived as running from 1750-1850. As Thomas Chatterton’s city, and also the place where William Wordsworth first met Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Bristol has a claim to the genesis of Romantic poetry. Moreover, alongside literature and radical politics, Bristol was also the intellectual crucible for writers such as Thomas Beddoes, Edward Jenner, and Humphry Davy: scientists who worked alongside poets, and this collaboration between the arts and science was set against the local background of debate over the slave trade. The Centre for Romantic Studies is therefore building on the Romantic City conference in order to extend the definition of ‘Romanticism’ into areas as diverse as medicine, science, human rights, and folklore.
The Centre for Romantic Studies is delighted to announce that there has been an enthusiastic response to the recent invitation for participation in potential events. Not only has there been crucial interdisciplinary interest within the university, particularly from the science faculties, but also from further abroad among other universities in the South West and beyond, from Exeter and Oxford to Massachusetts.
2005 was a very successful year for the Centre. The inaugural Romantic Science Day-school, took place on April 22nd, and focused on the life, work and influence of Edward Jenner. The event was hosted by the Jenner Museum at Berkeley, Gloucestershire and brought together speakers from both the sciences and the humanities to discuss the life and legacy of Jenner, his location in the cultural milieu of the Romantic era and the continuing relevance of his work to modern day society. Proceedings for the event are available. The event was a great success, demonstrating the fecund possibilities of interdisciplinary collaboration and building a momentum that we hope will continue into subsequent day-schools including an event on Thomas Beddoes scheduled for Autumn 2006. The Centre also organised a one-day symposium with The University of the West of England, Acts of Sincerity: Authenticity and Identity in the Romantic Era, (15 July 2005). The event attracted a range of papers ranging from the Occitan forgery of Fabre d'Olivet and Thomas Chatterton's antiquarianism to the rhetoric of Carlyle. A publication from the confererence is currently under negotiation, and the conference proved to be a highly successful collaboration.
November of 2005 also saw the first Romantic Studies lecture in collaboration with the Regional History Centre at UWE, in which Dr Ian Haywood (Roehampton University) lectured on The Bristol Riots of 1831. We hope to run a regular lecture on the culture and history of Bristol and the South-West, in order to capitalise on the great success of this inaugural event.
2006 promises to be an equally exciting year, with the first event the Romancing the East Conference in January (12-13th) attracting a highly prestigious line up of scholars. The conference represented an important step in the build up towards the 2007 BARS/NASSR Conference that the Centre will host next year, and proved to be highly successful.
The biggest event for the Centre in 2006 was the international conference on "Romantic Spectacle", organised with Roehampton University. The conference boasted an enviable line-up of plenary speakers in John Barrell, Anne Janowitz, Iain McCalman, and Saree Makdisi. Across the three days of the conference, scholars from across the world gathered to discuss the visualisation of culture in the Romantic Period from a variety of angles. We hope that the event will lead into a cycle of conferences hosted alternately between Bristol and Roehampton. This collaboration represents an exciting venture for the CRS, and we are delighted to be working with the Centre for Research in Romanticism at Roehampton.
In September of 2006, the CRS will host a conference on 'The British Periodical Text, 1796-1832' organised by Simon Hull. Registration forms are now available for this event, which with the distinguished line-up of plenary speakers promises, Gregory Dart, John Strachan and Tim Webb promises to be a highly influential contribution to the study of periodicals in the Romantic Period.
We are also pleased to announce that we now have confirmed dates a conference theme, and a call for papers for the 2007 BARS/NASSR Conference, which will run from 26-29 July, and will be based on the theme of Emancipation, Liberation, Freedom. Further details are accessible from the link above.
For further information on all our events please see our Events page.
Membership and General Enquiries can be directed to John Halliwell at: romantic-studies@bristol.ac.uk
Many thanks for taking the time to read this report. We hope that you will lend your support to the CRS as a celebration of Bristol’s cultural and scientific achievements.
