Posted on

**EXTENDED** NASSR Grad Student Caucus Elections: Call for Nominations

Washington Allston, Landscape with Lake (1804)

**We’ve decided to extend the deadline for nominations until Monday, August 12!**

Dear all,

The NASSR Graduate Student Caucus (NGSC) is having an open call for 4 new co-chairs, 2 from the US and 2 from Canada. Please submit nominations (self-nominations are welcome) to nassrgradstudentcaucus@gmail.com with a 150-word bio by Wednesday July 10th. We will then post the nominees on our blog the following day.

Voting will begin July 12th and run to July 26th. Any confirmed members of NASSR will be able to vote. Candidates will be notified of the results by Monday, July 29 and formally announced at the NGSC caucus meeting at our upcoming conference.
Caucus co-chairs serve for a 1-year term and help to create an accessible, inclusive, supportive space for graduate students studying Romanticism. During this term, they help to organize grad-focused panels and roundtables for the next NASSR conference, as well as social events. Co-chairs also manage the NGSC email, blog, Humanities Commons account. Occasionally, NGSC co-chairs may be asked to represent the graduate students in NASSR committees and judge contests.

If you have any questions, please contact us via our caucus email (NASSRGradStudentCaucus@gmail.com) or on Twitter (@NASSRGrads). Also feel free to join us on Humanities Commons and post comments or questions there.

Stephanie Edwards (McMaster U)
Sarah Faulkner (U of Washington)
Travis Chi Wing Lau (UT Austin)
Caroline Winter (U of Victoria)

Posted on

As Autumn Turns to Winter

By Emily Rupp

When I took my undergraduate survey course on British literature from the Romantics to the present, I had a little habit of writing down the poems I loved reading the most into the margins of my (now abandoned) bullet journal.  The imagery of the poems most often motivated me to collect them, but I also kept poems that held messages that resonated with me.  I didn’t want to forget them, and I certainly haven’t as “To Autumn,” by John Keats, keeps coming back into my mind as this semester comes to a close.
Continue reading “As Autumn Turns to Winter”

Posted on

Connection and Taking Care: Lamb and The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

By Lillian Lu

In the recent Netflix film, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, set in 1946, London writer Juliet Ashton (Lily James), tired of publishing under her usual pseudonym and still recovering from the trauma of losing her parents and home during the war, is searching for something to write about. The answer comes when she receives a letter from Dawsey Adams (Michiel Huisman), a farmer from the island of Guernsey, who was one of the founding members of the eponymous book club during the war years and who has come across her copy of Charles Lamb’s Essays of Elia. As the island has no more bookshops, he asks if she can send him an address of a London bookshop that might carry more of Lamb’s books. The Romantic essayist, Dawsey tells Juliet, was a great comfort to him during World War II, during which Guernsey was occupied by the Germans, all children evacuated, a curfew put in place, land mines planted on the beach, and their livestock taken away.
Continue reading “Connection and Taking Care: Lamb and The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society”

Posted on

#NASSR18 Day One

By Stephanie Edwards

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.
Continue reading “#NASSR18 Day One”

Posted on

A Genius Montage for Mary Shelley

By Lillian Lu

*This post contains spoilers for the film Mary Shelley.*
The recently released film, Mary Shelley (2018), directed by Haifaa al-Mansour (Wadjda) and written by Emma Jensen (Creating Fortune), received, at best, lukewarm reviews. Most film critics were disappointed in how the narrative falls unexcitingly into the genre of biopic. Others lamented that the film does not do justice to Mary Shelley the historical figure, so ahead of her contemporaries, and that the screenplay allows her husband, the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, to upstage her.
Continue reading “A Genius Montage for Mary Shelley”

Posted on

Interview with Thora Brylowe and Miranda Burgess

By Caroline Winter

Dr. Thora Brylowe and Dr. Miranda Burgess were co-winners of the 2017 NASSR/Romantic Circles Pedagogy Contest, as announced at NASSR 2017 in Ottawa. Thora is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Colorado Boulder, and Miranda is an Associate Professor of English at the University of British Columbia. They’ve been kind enough to tell us about their submission and share some tips for graduate students on teaching Romanticism.
Continue reading “Interview with Thora Brylowe and Miranda Burgess”

Posted on

The Devil You (may not) Know

By Christopher Kelleher

Recently, I have been working my way through C. S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters (1942). The text unfolds as a series of correspondence written in Hell from a ranking demon, Screwtape, to his aspiring young nephew, Wormwood, offering advice on how to best ensure the damnation of a man known only as “the Patient.” In view of Lewis’ legacy as a Christian apologist, the Letters’ rhetorical strategy appears glaringly obvious: by playing the devil Lewis hoped to inculcate a stronger sense of faith in his readership. Yet, what is striking about the Letters is how vociferously anti-Romantic the text is in its handling of theology, eschatology, and those weighty matters of doubt and faith. In one letter, for instance, Screwtape holds Coleridge up as a model of the kind of “superficial” worship of the divine that Wormwood should aim to cultivate in his patient in order to secure his spiritual downfall.[1]
Continue reading “The Devil You (may not) Know”

Posted on

The Poetics of Silence in Guillermo Del Toro’s The Shape of Water

By Samantha Ellen Morse

While in Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) Guillermo del Toro evocatively engages with Victorian fin-de-siècle Gothic tales (especially those of Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood), the creative wellspring for his newest film, The Shape of Water (2017), pours from the Romantic period. It is Frankenstein meets melodrama (Thomas Holcroft’s A Tale of Mystery comes to mind), and it’s absolutely brilliant. Romantic Romanticists, this is definitely the movie you want to see for Valentine’s Day.

Continue reading “The Poetics of Silence in Guillermo Del Toro’s The Shape of Water”