NASSR Graduate Student Caucus (NGSC)
The Graduate Student Community of the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism
By Claire Wilcox
I begin this post with that awkward, full disclosure: I am an M.A. student. I have not applied for Ph.D. programs. This year’s conference was my first, and likely only, NASSR. You ask: why bother reading further? My answer is this: standing with one foot out the door is a great vantage point.
Continue reading “NASSR 2018 Debrief: Confessions of an M.A. Student”
By Caroline Winter
Dr. Nikki Hessell is a co-winner of this year’s NASSR/Romantic Circles Pedagogy Contest, as announced at NASSR 2017 in Ottawa. Nikki is a Senior Lecturer in the School of English, Film, Theatre and Media Studies at the Victoria University of Wellington. She’s been kind enough to tell us about her submission and share some tips for graduate students on teaching Romanticism.
Continue reading “Interview with Dr. Nikki Hessell, Co-Winner of the 2017 NASSR/Romantic Circles Pedagogy Contest”
By Caroline Winter
Atesede Makonnen is the winner of the 2017 NASSR Graduate Student Paper Prize. She is starting her second year as an English PhD student at Johns Hopkins University (MA in Shakespeare Studies, King’s College London, BA, Dartmouth College). Her research examines performance and race. Her winning paper will be published in the conference issue of European Romantic Review.
Continue reading “Interview with Atesede Makonnen”
By Stephanie Edwards
Every day during this year’s conference, one or more NASSR grads will post a recap of the day’s events. Many delegates are livetweeting, so we’re also using Storify to capture each day’s highlights.
Storify Recap
https://storify.com/EditrixCaroline/nassr-2017-day-one
Stephanie Edwards’ Recap
As a NASSR conference newbie, my first day of this year’s conference was a haze of drinking coffee, attempting to subtly read nametags, and writing feverishly in my notebook. Above all, though, today provided me with an overwhelming amount of generative and invigorating scholarship and a chance to listen to the exciting new work being done by many Romantic critics who I have admired for a long time. From this morning’s panel, “Plant Love and Vital Sparks: Materialism, Vitalism, and Erasmus Darwin,” in which paper topics ranged from the ambiguity of electricity in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to the sexual politics of Blake’s amaryllis, to the panel that closed out my day, “Feeling/Less/Life,” where David Clark, Lubabah R. Chowdhury, and Jonathan C. Williams provided an absolutely fascinating discussion on the aesthetics of death, each panel I attended either increased my interest in an already-familiar branch of scholarship or alerted me to new areas and ideas that left me wanting to spend the night getting cozy with the MLA Bibliography.
Continue reading “NASSR 2017 Daily Recap: Thursday, Aug. 10”
Reflections, questions, & forum for response.
The dawn of another academic year always comes with a slew of first year Teaching Assistants. Graduate students must now stand up in front of the classroom and, if any of them are like me, spend more time reflecting on their own learning processes than ever before in their academic life. Like so many gradate TAs I don’t have the option to choose which courses or syllabus to teach, but rather am assigned courses that vary between English Composition 100 and Intro to Literature. I’m not complaining as each opportunity provides the space to learn a new topic that otherwise might have slipped my academic history.
Continue reading “What does a Romantic Classroom Look Like?”
By Caroline Winter
The debate about the role of social media in academia that took over my Twitter feed a few weeks ago (read about it in The Guardian and in Forbes) has prompted me to think about the role of blogging as well, particularly for graduate students, who are perhaps especially concerned about being seen as “serious academics.”
Continue reading “Why We Blog”
By Cailey Hall
Saturday’s tweets about NASSR 2016 via Storify
Saturday at NASSR was a marathon day for me, starting with an 8:30 am seminar run by the brilliant Mary Favret. Cheekily titled “Affect: Enough Already!” the seminar examined the role affect studies has played in the field. Among other questions, Favret asked: What has a focus on affect taught us to see? What has it taught us not to see? What are the historical conditions (academic, political, socioeconomic) that have promoted the study of affect, and to what ends?
Over the course of the two-hour seminar, we grappled with the always difficult question of how different affect authorities (eg: Baruch Spinoza, Sylvan Tompkins, or Adam Smith) shape our understanding of what “affect” even means. Among other topics, we discussed the relationship of affect to excess, and the possibility of recycling or recuperating affective excesses. We also pondered the sometimes problematic ways affect gets attached to questions of freedom – freedom of individual feeling in particular – and the tacit assumption that affect has positive connotations, while “ideas” tend to be viewed negatively. And we addressed the way affect’s mobility can (sometimes troublingly) erase distinctions, as well as affect’s tendency to take material or embodied form, even as we often insist on its immateriality. We also asked how and why affect gets deployed, both in the literature we study, and in our own literary analysis.
Continue reading “NASSR 2016 Rapid Response: Day Three”
Hello, everyone
As Arden mentioned in her Farewell Editorial, she will soon defend her dissertation and is therefore stepping down as Managing Editor of the NGSC Blog. It has been my pleasure to write for the blog for the past year or so, and I must thank Arden for the opportunity to do that and to follow in her footsteps as the blog’s editor.
We’ll continue to publish posts throughout the summer, and a call for bloggers for the upcoming academic year will be posted shortly. In the meantime, feel free to contact me winterc[at]uvic[dot]ca with any queries or ideas about the blog.
Caroline
Dear colleagues and friends,
It has been a tremendous pleasure to serve as the NASSR Graduate Student Caucus Blog editor since the Autumn of 2014. I have been privileged to read the work of many wonderful writers, who have each lent their distinctive approach to the study of Romanticism. We have been lucky to have had a Poet and an Artist in Residence, an art historian with a specialization in ecological criticism, Keatsians, Goths, Austen experts, literary scholars from graduate programs across the United States, Canada, and Europe, and many fabulous guest writers who work in nineteenth-century studies. To each of you, thank you for your contributions. I hope you will continue writing for the NGSC in future, and I look forward to seeing many of you at NASSR in Berkeley this summer.
Continue reading “Farewell Editorial”
After an arduous year one of grad school I have come out alive. In anxious preparation for year two a few good friends and myself set quite the task this summer to read Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit that haunted us all year. Given the complexity and reputation of the great man himself I find our “Adventures in Hegel” will entertain readers on how we successfully managed reading his “Preface” to the book. What follows is the affective and intellectual journey myself and friends Katy and Liz have embarked upon.
In lieu of actually trying to explain Hegelian thought or even relay my precise thoughts on the preface I provide some useful tactics we employed to “mastering”, well, getting through difficult texts such as Hegel. Now at the end of year one of graduate studies I can attest the most common nerve-racking question from new grad students to be “How do I read X?” Whether long novels, poetry, images, and of course theory/philosophy everyone has that one form they consider impenetrable to decipher. My fellow book club interlocutors agreed our reading of Hegel to be extremely enlightening and cleared up many conceptual gaps. It does help we’re all good friends but we actually had a great afternoon discussing Hegel? It was fun, and not soul-crushingly dark and intimidating? But how?! Our satisfaction shows such texts are indeed very approachable with just the right attitude.
Continue reading “Preface to Graduate School: Reading Hegel or learning how to read again”