With winter break almost now in full swing, we have to come to a frightening realization: MLA 2016 in Austin is just 3 weeks away!
In preparation for this event, the largest of our academic yearly conferences, some of us might be sweating profusely over the idea of interviewing for those dearly coveted jobs, while others may be frantically polishing papers for our MLA debuts.
To help minimize the fury of pre-conference preparations, here below you’ll find a list of panels and events that may be of particular interest to young Romantic scholars and graduate students. Bookmark it now!
The entire searchable program is available online here. And the Committee on the Status of Graduate Students in the Profession has gathered a catalogue of important networking and social events at the conference, along with workshops and panels of interest to graduate students, which can be found listed here.
See you in Austin!!
THURSDAY, JANUARY 7th
Preconference Workshops
Careers for Humanists: A Job Search Workshop
Thursday, 8.30-11.30am, 12B, ACC
Preconvention Workshop for Job Seekers in English
Thursday, 11.45am-1.15pm, 14, ACC
Panels
Thu 12.00 – 1.15pm
16. Sublime Bodies, circa 1730-1830
Thursday, 12.00-1.15pm, 18D, ACC
Presiding: Terry Robinson (Toronto) and Michele Speitz (Furman)
“‘We Rather Feel than Survey It’: Ocular Physiology in Eighteenth-Century British Aesthetics,” Scott MacKenzie (British Columbia)
“Sublime Embodiment and Mechanical Vitality,” Michele Speitz (Furman)
“‘O, for a Muse of Fire’: Edmund Kean and the Drama of the Ineffable,” Terry Robinson (Toronto)
“The Sublime Body in William Blake’s Milton and Jerusalem,” David Monroe Baulch (West Florida)
36. Romanticism, Poverty, and Impoverishment
Thursday, 12.00-1.15pm, 19B, ACC
Presiding: Margaret Russett (Southern California)
“Impoverished Modernity,” Kevin Gilmartin (California Inst. of Tech.)
“‘Slaves of Ignorance’: Poverty and Education in The Excursion,” Ella Brians (Princeton)
“Poverty 1835: Wordsworth’s ‘Yarrow Revisited’ and Andrew Ure’s The Philosophy of Manufactures,” Peter Manning (SUNY Stony Brook)
“Coetzee’s Wordsworth,” Jonathan Mulrooney (Holy Cross)
Thu 1.45 – 3.00pm
76. Nineteenth-Century Publics, Romantic Readers
Thursday, 1.45-3.00pm, 301, JW Marriott
Presiding: Jan Mieszkowski (Reed Coll.)
“Scott’s Children: Romantic Poetry and Mass Education at the Turn of the Century,” Michael Cohen (UCLA)
“Public Service: Announcement or Utterance,” Lenora Hanson (Wisconsin, Madison)
“Hegel, Brummell, and the Actuarial Public,” Chad McCracken (Lake Forest Coll.)
Thu 3.30 – 4.45pm
115. The Futures of Shelley’s Triumph
Thursday, 3.30-4.45pm, 4BC, ACC
Presiding: Joel Faflak (Western Ontario)
“As If That Look Must Be the Last,” Jacques Khalip (Brown)
“Rhymes of Wonder: Otherness without Distortion,” Elizabeth Fay (UMass Boston)
“‘A Veil of Light is Drawn’: Percy Shelley’s Minor Cinema,” Forest Pyle (Oregon)
Respondent: Orrin Wang (Maryland)
Thu 5.15 – 6.30pm
126. Romantic Quotation: The Use of Quoted Material in British Romanticism
Thursday, 5.15-6.30pm, 6B, ACC
Presiding: Joel Frederic Pace (Wisconsin, Eau Claire)
“The Evidentiary Quotation and Romanticism’s Composite Orders,” Dahlia Porter (North Texas)
“Felicia Hemans, Washington Irving, and the Traffic in Citation,” Cynthia Williams (Wentworth Inst. of Tech.)
“Romantic Quotation in John Keats’s ‘The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream,’” Ross Murfin (Southern Methodist)
Thu 7.00 – 8.15pm
161. The British Pharmacopoeia
Thursday, 7.00-8.15pm, 14, ACC
Presiding: Juliet Shields (Washington, Seattle); Rivka Swenson (Virginia Commonwealth)
“Immateria Medica: Radcliffe and the Physicians,” Jayne Elizabeth Lewis (California, Irvine)
“Precarious Ecologies: Medical Semiotics and Criticism in the Scottish Enlightenment,” Kevis Goodman (California, Berkeley)
“Physiological Poetics and the Social Sublime,” John Savarese, (Waterloo)
“Nerves, Nation, Network: James Johnson’s Medical Nationalism,” Miranda Burgess (British Columbia)
196. The Interval in Romanticism
Thursday, 7.00-8.15pm, Lone Star C, JW Marriott
Presiding: Elizabeth Fay (UMass Boston)
“Touching Intervals: Reading Drawing in Coleridge’s Notebooks,” Sonia Hofkosh (Tufts)
“Hegel’s Irritability,” Tilottama Rajan (Western Ontario)
“Intervals of Time,” Jonathan Sachs (Concordia)
FRIDAY, JANUARY 8th
Fri 8.30 – 9.45am
240. Temporalities: Model, Record, Rupture
Friday, 8.30-9.45am, 8C, ACC
Presiding: Denise Gigante (Stanford)
“The Model of Origins: Grand and Not-So-Grand Narratives in Mary Shelley,” Ian Grant Balfour (York)
“Balladic Temporality: The Ballad as Record,” Adrian Daub (Stanford)
“Temporal Rupture: Blake and the Center of Romanticism,” Alexander Regier (Rice)
Fri 10.15 – 11.30am
251. Deconstruction and the Romantic Legacy
Friday, 10.15-11.30am, 7, ACC
Presiding: Kir Kuiken (SUNY Albany)
“‘Hölderlin en Amérique’: De Man’s Hölderlin,” Andrzej Warminski (California, Irvine)
“Rhetoric of Cannibalism: Novalis and Derrida,” Nicole Sütterlin (Harvard)
“Apostrophe 2.0,” Marc Redfield (Brown)
Fri 12.00 – 1.15pm
311. Byron and America
Friday, 12.00-1.15pm, 7, ACC
Presiding: Noah Comet (Naval Acad.)
“Black Byronism,” Matt Sandler (Columbia)
“Byron and the Yellowstone Frontier,” Noah Comet (Naval Acad.)
“Byron as Greek Ambassador to America,” William Keach (Brown)
“Specters of Byron in Nineteenth-Century America,” Susan Wolfson (Princeton)
Fri 1.45 – 3.00pm
357. Getting Published in a Scholarly Journal
Friday, 1.45-3.00pm, JW Grand 4, JW Marriott
Presiding: Michael Clarke (Calgary)
Speakers: Michael Clarke (Calgary); Faye Halpern (Calgary); Stephanie Hawkins (North Texas); Graham MacPhee (West Chester); James Phelan (Ohio State)
Fri 3.30 – 4.45pm
374. After John Clare
Friday, 3.30-4.45pm, 6B, ACC
Presiding: Bruce Graver (Providence Coll.)
“Clare’s Lyric Events,” Alan Vardy (Hunter Coll., CUNY)
“Clare’s Lyrics as Ecosystem Models,” Heidi Scott (Florida International)
“Impersonal yet Intimate: John Clare and the Early Nature Poems of Seamus Heaney,” Florian Gargaillo (Boston)
Fri 5.15 – 6.30pm
434. Affect Studies and British Romanticism
Friday, 5.15-6.30pm, 5A, ACC
Presiding: Seth Reno (Auburn, Montgomery)
“‘Some Powerful Rankling Passions’: An Interdisciplinary Exploration of Emotion-Regulation Strategies in Joanna Baillie’s Passion Plays,” M. Soledad Caballero; Aimee Knupsky (Allegheny)
“Circulating Affect: Reading Embodied Cognition in Wordsworth and Keats,” Renee Harris (Kansas)
“Affect Theory and Eliza Fenwick’s Secresy; or, The Ruin on the Rock,” Jonas Seth Cope (California State, Sacramento)
Fri 7.00 – 8.15pm
Social Event
Cash Bar arranged by the forums LLC Scottish, LLC English Romantic, and LLC Late-Eighteenth-Century English
Friday, 7.00-8.15pm, 12B, ACC
SATURDAY, JANUARY 9th
Sat 8.30 – 9.45am
469. The Intermedial Eighteenth Century: Stage to Page, Print to Manuscript, Writing to Speech, and Back
Saturday, 8.30-9.45am, 18A, ACC
Presiding: Jonathan Sachs (Concordia)
Speakers: Emily Hodgson Anderson (Southern California); Michael Gamer (Pennsylvania); John Savarese (Waterloo); Stuart Sherman (Fordham); Mark Vareschi (Wisconsin, Madison)
481. Romantic Religion in Global Perspectives
Saturday, 8.30-9.45am, 6B, ACC
Presiding: James McKusick (Missouri, Kansas City)
“More Than Life,” Colin Jager (Rutgers)
“Coleridge, Dissent, and Lyric Progressivism,” Mark Canuel (Illinois)
“Coleridge, Contemplation, and Consilience: Mind Science East and West,” Mark Lussier (Arizona State)
Sat 10.15 – 11.30am
529. Romantic Ecocriticism: Thinking Forward
Saturday, 10.15-11.30am, 10B, ACC
Presiding: Susan Oliver (Essex)
“From Civilized Skylarks to Socialized Nightingales: ‘Urbanature’ in Shelley and Keats,” Ashton Nichols (Dickinson Coll)
“Thinking through Catastrophe, Tentative about Futurity: Blake’s Milton,” Theresa Kelley (Wisconsin)
“‘In the Cowslips Peeps I Lye’: Romantic Botanizing, Climate Change, and the Reach of Clare’s Flower Signatures,” Anne-Lise Francois (California, Berkeley)
Sat 12.00 – 1.15pm
548. The Public Jane Austen in Austin; or, How to Keep Austen Weird
Saturday, 12.00-1.15pm, 8C, ACC
Presiding: Devoney Looser (Arizona State)
“Jane Austen and the ‘After 9/11’ Question,” Mary Ann O’Farrell (Texas A&M)
“Will and Jane, at Four Hundred and Two Hundred,” Janine Barchas (Texas, Austin); Kristina Straub (Carnegie Mellon)
“Some Like It Hot: Love and Sex with Jane Austen,” Nor Nachumi (Stern Coll. For Women)
Sat 1.45 – 3.00pm
595. Nervous Systems: Maps, Meters, Diagrams, Frost
Saturday, 1.45-3.00pm, 18A, ACC
Presiding: Marjorie Levinson (Michigan)
“Parsing the Frost: Growth of a Poet’s Sentence in ‘Frost at Midnight,’” Marjorie Levinson (Michigan)
“Cartometrics and the Modeling of the Nation,” Julia S. Carlson (Cincinnati)
“What Meter Do Donkeys Bray In? The Politicization of Prosody in the Romantic Era,” Tim Fulford (De Montfort Univ., Leicester)
Sat 3.30 – 4.45pm
624. Romantic Readers, Nineteenth-Century Publics
Saturday, 3.30-4.45pm, 7, ACC
Presiding: Jan Mieszkowski (Reed Coll.)
“William Blake’s Impersonal Confession,” Katherine Ding (California, Berkeley)
“Philological Reading,” Frances Ferguson (Chicago)
“Reading and Being Read: On ‘Received Speech’ in Hazlitt and Austen,” Tristram Wolff (Northwestern)
SUNDAY, JANUARY 10th
Sun 8.30 – 9.45am
735. Romantic Sovereignty
Sunday, 8.30-9.45am, 5B, ACC
Presiding: Mark Canuel (Illinois)
“Kleist, Haiti, and the Vicissitudes of Sovereignty,” Kir Kuiken (SUNY Albany)
“Play Time: Austen, Byron, and the Place of the Nonsovereign,” Orrin Wang (Maryland)
“Anthropomorphism, Anthropocene,” Sara Guyer (Wisconsin, Madison)
Sun 10.15 – 11.30am
750. Global Romanticism in Theory and Practice
Sunday, 10.15-11.30am, 10A, ACC
Presiding: Evan Gottlieb
Speakers: Elizabeth Bohls (Oregon); Manu Chander (Rutgers); Mary Favret (Indiana); Talissa Ford (Temple); James Mulholland (North Carolina State); Paul Youngquist (Colorado, Boulder)
Sun 12.00 – 1.15pm
788. The Romantic Public
Sunday, 12.00-1.15pm, 8A, ACC
Presiding: Matthew Borushko (Stonehill Coll.)
“Gifted Histories: Scott’s Fictions of Suspended Accountability,” Isaac Cowell (Rutgers)
“‘Ideas of Adolescence’: Shelley, College, Culture,” Christopher Rovee (Louisiana State)
“Capital in the Twenty-First Century; or, Piketty’s Romantic Public Sphere from Austen to after Celan,” Robert Kaufman (California, Berkeley)
Sun 1.45 – 3.00pm
824. Romantic Genealogies of Kinship
Sunday, 1.45-3.00pm, 5B, ACC
Presiding: Talia Vestri Croan (Boston)
“Spots of Sibling Time: Relational Networks in Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads,” Talia Vestri Croan (Boston)
“In the Place of a Parent: Romanticism and Adoption,” Eric C. Walker (Florida State)
“No Friends of the Family: Mary Shelley and Fanny Holcroft,” Julie A. Carlson (California, Santa Barbara)