Enlightenment Romanticism Contemporary Culture

Professor Peter Otto

Executive Director, Enlightenment, Romanticism, and Contemporary Culture Research Unit (ERCC); Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor, English and Theatre Studies, The University of Melbourne

Peter Otto has published widely on William Blake, Gothic Fictions, dark Romanticism, popular entertainments, the prehistory of virtual reality, and Romanticism and contemporary culture. Recent publications include Multiplying Worlds: Romanticism, Modernity, and the Emergence of Virtual Reality (OUP 2011); 'Innovations in Encompassing Large Scenes', an online exhibition housed in the Romantic Circles Gallery of Visual Culture (2013); and William Blake: Selected Works in the 21st Century Oxford Authors Series (2018). He is consultant editor of The Victorian Popular Culture Portal: Spiritualism, Sensation, and Magic. His current research interests include the history of imagination and of imagination-machines; the pasts and futures of virtual reality; the post-secular; and the exchanges between architecture, fiction, imagination, and experience.

Email: peterjo@unimelb.edu.au
Phone: +61 3 8344 5482

Professor Deirdre Coleman

Co-Director and Lead Researcher, ERCC; Robert Wallace Chair of English, English and Theatre Studies, School of Culture and Communication, The University of Melbourne

Deirdre Coleman has published widely on the intersection of British Romantic literature with antislavery, natural history and colonialism. More recently she has been researching museum archives in Melbourne, Sydney and Queensland for an ARC-funded Linkage project with the Australian Museum on the economics of the 19th-century natural history trade. She is also exploring the social history of collecting in Australia, looking in particular at the diverse community which produced knowledge about the natural world from earliest settlement onwards. Starting with the correspondence networks and journal publications of members of the Victorian Field Naturalists Club (established in the early 1880s), she examines the motives and interests of bushmen, commercial specimen dealers, amateur collectors and (from 1900 onwards) an increasing number of salaried museum professionals. Cross-cultural exchange between indigenous people and fieldwork collectors on the colonial frontier, especially in far north Queensland and the Northern Territory, forms another part of this project, the aim of which is to achieve a wider understanding of Australia's natural heritage and environmental history.

Email: colemand@unimelb.edu.au
Phone: +61 3 8344 5496

Professor Clara Tuite

Co-Director and Lead Researcher, ERCC; English and Theatre Studies, School of Culture and Communication, The University of Melbourne

Clara Tuite works in the literary and cultural history of Romanticism, with a particular interest in the work of Jane Austen and Lord Byron. Her research engages eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Romantic literature and culture from the perspectives of the history of the literary institution, sociability, fashion, history of emotions and sexuality studies, as well as the endurance of literary and popular Romanticisms in the contemporary moment.

Email: clarat@unimelb.edu.au
Phone: +61 3 8344 4216

Associate Professor Mark Davis

Co-Director and Lead Researcher, ERCC; Publishing and Communications, School of Culture and Communication, The University of Melbourne

Mark Davis' current research focuses on online 'anti-publics' and extreme online discourse, Australian digital literary cultures and taste making, changing media ecologies and the cultural politics of gatekeeping and disintermediation, Australian public culture, and media representations of young people. The first of my two current research projects focuses on post-digital literary cultures and the destabilisation of the literary-print cultural field by digital media. My second project focuses on online anti-publics, such as the alt-right, neo-reactionary (NRx) groups, anti-vaccination groups, anti-climate-science groups, and white nationalist groups, who use digital media to create communities that position themselves against basic democratic, scientific, and enlightenment principles.

Email: davismr@unimelb.edu.au
Phone: +61 3 8344 3349

Professor Vedi Hadiz

Co-Director and Lead Researcher, ERCC; Director and Professor of Asian Studies at the Asia Institute, The University of Melbourne

Vedi Hadiz's research interests revolve around political sociology and political economy issues, especially those related to the contradictions of development in Indonesia and Southeast Asia more broadly, and more recently, in the Middle East. Professor Hadiz's latest book is entitled Islamic Populism in Indonesia and the Middle East (Cambridge University Press 2016). His other books include Localising Power in Post-Authoritarian Indonesia: A Southeast Asia Perspective (Stanford University Press 2010) as well as the co-edited Between Dissent and Power: The Transformation of Islamic Politics in the Middle East and Asia (Palgrave Macmillan 2014).

Email: vedi.hadiz@unimelb.edu.au

Dr Anita Archer

Research Associate, Enlightenment, Romanticism, and Contemporary Culture Research Unit, Faculty of Arts, The University of Melbourne

Anita Archer is an art historian whose research focus is contemporary art markets, with interest in the changing dynamics of primary and secondary markets, the evolving domination of multinational auction houses and the networked activities of art world intermediaries in the translocation of art globally. Anita's PhD thesis examined the emerging market for Chinese Contemporary Art in the West and her recent focus is the role of Singapore as an art market hub for Southeast Asia. Anita's research interest stems from her extensive work experience in the global art field as an international auctioneer and independent art consultant specialising in Asian contemporary art.

Email: anita.archer@unimelb.edu.au

Professor Trevor Burnard

Research Associate, Enlightenment, Romanticism, and Contemporary Culture Research Unit; Professor, Wilberforce Institute for the Study of Slavery and Emancipation, University of Hull

Trevor Burnard is a scholar of early American, imperial, world and Atlantic history, with a special interest in plantation societies in the New World and their connections to eighteenth-century modernity. Particular interests include slavery, social history and demography, imperialism, economic and business history, and gender. His work over the last decade has been especially concerned with identity in the New World in the eighteenth century and with how settler societies have been formed, or have failed to form in plantation societies in the Caribbean and the Chesapeake.

Email: T.G.Burnard@hull.ac.uk

Associate Professor Justin Clemens

Academic, School of Culture and Communication, The University of Melbourne

Justin Clemen's work focuses primarily on the relationships between poetry, psychology and philosophy in Romantic and post-Romantic writing. He has written extensively on figures such as Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, and Alain Badiou, as well as on themes of slavery and technology. His recent books include What is Education? (Edinburgh UP 2017), edited with A.J. Bartlett and The Afterlives of Georges Perec (Edinburgh UP 2017), edited with Rowan Wilken.

Email: jclemens@unimelb.edu.au
Photo credit: Nicholas Walton-Healey

Dr Thomas H. Ford

Lecturer in English, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, La Trobe University

Thomas Ford's work focuses on poems and other texts from Romanticism and the long eighteenth century. He reads this archive in the historicist traditions of philological materialism, and in light of the transdisciplinary imperatives of the environmental humanities. Ford calls this approach 'ecophilology' (a discipline that explores the role of textual environments in various settings, in all kinds of media, from the ancient cave drawings and graffiti to the contemporary electronic media). You can read about it in his new book, Wordsworth and the Poetics of Air (Cambridge University Press, April 2018).

Email: T.Ford@latrobe.edu.au

Dr Sean Gaston

Visiting Scholar, Wolfson College Oxford (2017-2018), Emeritus Reader in English, Brunel University, London, and Honorary Research Fellow, The University of Melbourne

I am exploring 'the eighteenth century origins of modernity'. I have focused on concepts of disinterest, sympathy and pity, as well as fictions of imprudence and the invention of the literary character. I am now working on concepts of world in British Romanticism, Revolutionary America and the 'Atlantic World'.

Email: gastons@unimelb.edu.au

Professor Charles Green

Professor of Contemporary Art, School of Culture and Communication, The University of Melbourne

Charles Green is an authority in contemporary international and Australian art, on biennials and exhibition histories, and on artist collaborations. His books include Biennials, Triennials and Documenta: The Exhibitions that Created Contemporary Art (2016, co-authored with Anthony Gardner), The Third Hand: Artist Collaborations from Conceptualism to Postmodernism (2001), and Peripheral Vision: Contemporary Australian Art 1970-94 (1995). He has been awarded several ARC grants and was Adjunct Senior Curator of Contemporary Art at the National Gallery of Victoria (2001-2006), leading large curatorial teams who produced major exhibitions, including the inaugural, museum-wide installation of modern and contemporary Australian art at NGVA Federation Square (Fieldwork, 2001) as an outcome of an ARC Large Grant. He is also an artist, having worked in collaboration with Lyndell Brown as one artist since 1989; their works are in most Australian art museum collections and they were Australia’s Official War Artists in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2007.

Email: c.green@unimelb.edu.au

Dr Elias Greig

Research Assistant, Enlightenment, Romanticism, and Contemporary Culture Research Unit, Faculty of Arts, The University of Melbourne

Elias Greig's work considers the interaction between artistic and political representation, with a particular interest in the effects of democracy on literary form, from the eighteenth century to the present.

Email: elias.greig@unimelb.edu.au

Dr Steven Hampton

Sessional Lecturer in English and Theatre Studies, School of Culture and Communication, The University of Melbourne

Steven Hampton's research centres on the multilingual and transnational nature of cultural and literary production during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in particular the interrelations between literatures in English, French and German. His current focus is the national epic as it was reconstructed, rediscovered or invented during the Age of Revolutions in Europe.

Email: hamptons@unimelb.edu.au

Dr Alexandra Hankinson

Research Assistant, Enlightenment, Romanticism, and Contemporary Culture Research Unit, Faculty of Arts, The University of Melbourne

Alexandra Hankinson’s research focuses on the literary and cultural history of biological thought and phenomena from the Enlightenment to the present. Her doctoral thesis explored the cross-section between figurative and scientific thought in the botany and zoology of the long eighteenth century, with emphasis given to the way in which observation and analogy came together in this period to uncover and explain the affinities of living objects. She has published on the poetic and scientific history of insect pollination in Romanticism (2019) and is currently working on an online exhibition for the Romantic Circles Gallery of Visual Culture on hybrid and interspecific relationships. Her present research interests include the co-functioning of art and science in the discovery and description of camouflage and mimicry; histories of biodiversity and ecology in Australia; field notes; imaginative and scientific responses to avian migration; and seasonality and harvest in Romantic art and literature.

Email: alexandra.hankinson@unimelb.edu.au

Dr Jodi Heap

School of Culture and Communication, The University of Melbourne

Jodie’s research focuses on Western philosophical conceptions of the imagination and the imaginary from Aristotle to Castoriadis. Her PhD thesis, titled The Imagination. The Seed of Indeterminacy in the Writings of Kant, Fichte and Castoriadis, offered a scholarly elucidation of the notion of the imagination and the imaginary as well as provided a new way of thinking about the imagination as an embodied power of formation and of creation fundamental to both the ontology of being and of ways of being. Her area of research also explores the role of the imagination and the imaginary in relation to the concepts of creation and creativity, and in relation to creative forms of thinking and of practice, both at the level of the individual and society. Jodie has a particular interest in the ERCC project ‘Creativity, Critique, Innovation’ and has contributed to the ERCC seminar series in her seminar titled, Unleashing the Creative Imagination in the Domains of the Humanities, Science and Art.

Email: jodie.heap@unimelb.edu.au

Dr James Jiang

School of Culture and Communication, The University of Melbourne

James Jiang's research traces the residues of Romantic thought in modern and contemporary British and American writing. His recent articles on William James and Marianne Moore draw out the implications for literary modernism and philosophical pragmatism of concepts such as style and character - concepts which assume their modern shape in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. James is currently at work on a project entitled Sage Modernism that explores the intersection between pragmatist poetics and therapeutic culture.

Email: james.jiang@unimelb.edu.au

Dr Claire Knowles

Senior Lecturer in English Literature, La Trobe University, Melbourne

Claire Knowles has published numerous articles on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women writers. Her book, Sensibility and Female Poetic Tradition, 1780-1860: The Legacy of Charlotte Smith, was published by Ashgate in 2009 and she also recently edited, with Ingrid Horrocks, Charlotte Smith: Major Poetic Works (Broadview, 2017.) She is currently working on a project on newspaper poetry and popular literary culture in the Romantic period titled, "Romanticism, Newspapers, and the Democratization of Poetry, 1785-1810."

Email: c.knowles@latrobe.edu.au

Professor Ian McLean

Hugh Ramsay Chair of Australian Art History, The University of Melbourne

Ian McLean has published extensively on Australian art and particularly Indigenous art. Since the late eighteenth century the Australian colonies have been a privileged site of Enlightenment endeavours in science, art and literature – as Bernard Smith convincingly discussed in European Vision and the South Pacific (1960). As a student of Smith, Ian's research has consistently explored the shadow of the Enlightenment in Australia and its histories.

Email: i.mclean@unimelb.edu.au

Dr Marc Mierowsky

McKenzie Postdoctoral Fellow, School of Culture and Communication, The University of Melbourne

Marc Mierowsky's research ranges broadly across period and genre, but is unified by the drive to investigate questions of collective identity and uncover the cultural dimensions of citizenship. He is one of the editors of Daniel Defoe's Correspondence (along with Nicholas Seager and Andreas Mueller) forthcoming with Cambridge University Press, and editor (along with Nicholas Seager) of Defoe's Roxana, forthcoming with Oxford World's Classics. His interest in Enlightenment thought and literature coheres around questions of sovereignty, naturalisation and constitutionality, the emergence of common-sense philosophy and theories of intersubjectivity. He is currently working on two discrete but overlapping projects: a narrative history of the group of spies whose work helped bring Scotland into an incorporated Union with England in 1707 and a cultural history of naturalisation in Britain and the Australian colonies. In recent work he has focused on the enlightenments of Eastern Europe, with particular emphasis on the Haskalah (or Jewish Enlightenment) and its influence on contemporary literature, ethics and stand-up comedy.

Email: marc.mierowsky@unimelb.edu.au

Professor Jennifer Milam

Research Associate, Enlightenment, Romanticism, and Contemporary Culture Research Unit, Faculty of Arts, The University of Melbourne; Pro Vice-Chancellor Academic Excellence, The University of Newcastle, Australia

Jennifer Milam's research interests focus on understanding how the visual arts during the eighteenth century expressed philosophical ideas that rivalled the exposition of Enlightenment concepts in texts. Arguably what changed from the mid-eighteenth century onwards was broader exposure to 'big ideas' in visual form. Enlightenment ideas enjoyed wider circulation and cultural uptake through public exhibitions of art works that engaged audiences in interpretive response to aspects of the Enlightenment project. As a former Co-Director of the Enlightenment, Romanticism, and Contemporary Culture Research Unit (ERCC), Milam used her expertise in exactly this area to provide input into the research program of the ERCC by keeping this aspect of the Enlightenment in focus and elaborating upon its legacy in the contemporary culture sector.

Email: jennifer.milam@newcastle.edu.au

Associate Professor John Rundell

Principal Fellow, School of Culture and Communication, The University of Melbourne and Adjunct Professor in Philosophy, La Trobe University, Melbourne

John Rundell's research focuses on the problems of the imagination, creativity and modernity. As ERCC Research Fellow he is especially interested in the themes of 'Critique, Creativity, Comparison' and 'Worldiness, Cosmopolitanism, Globalisation'. His publications include Origins of Modernity; Imaginaries of Modernity; Aesthetics and Modernity Essays by Agnes Heller; Rethinking Imagination (with Gillian Robinson); Blurred Boundaries (with Rainer Bauboeck), and ‘Creating Social Theory: Enlightenment, Romanticism, Revolution’ in The Handbook for Social Theory edited by George Ritzer and Barry Smart. He is currently completing a book on the work of Immanuel Kant entitled Kant and Critical Theories before turning to another entitled The Creative Imagination: From Kant to Castoriadis and Beyond.

Email: johnfr@unimelb.edu.au

Dr Miranda Stanyon

ARC DECRA Research Fellow, School of Culture and Communication, The University of Melbourne

Miranda Stanyon’s research focuses on enlightenment and Romantic era literature in Britain and Germany and takes a comparative approach to aesthetics, as a key field in constructing the post-enlightenment human subject and configuring its relationships with nature. She has published on the sublime, music and sound, emotions history, and visual culture.

Email: stanyonm@unimelb.edu.au

Dr Phil Habil Jennifer Wawrzinek

Freie Universität Berlin

Jennifer Wawrzinek’s research focuses on the intersections between the political and the ethical in literature and culture of the Romantic and post-Romantic eras. She recently completed a monograph entitled Beyond Identity: Romanticism and Decreation, which investigates modes of decreation in British Romanticism as a response to the political and ethical crises of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Jennifer is currently editing, together with Lisa O’Connell (UQ), a special issue of the journal Postcolonial Studies which will investigate the ways in which global movements and colonial contact in the long eighteenth century can be seen to have transformed or reinvented European literature and culture of the period. She is currently developing a new research project which aims to investigate Romantic models of relationality in which (human) being is conceived as embedded within a world that is not only biological, but techno-ecological as well. This project is particularly interested in the human-animal-machine formations of William Blake.

Email: j.wawrzinek@fu-berlin.de

Louise Box

Tutor, Master of Art Curatorship, and PhD Candidate (Art History), School of Culture and Communication, The University of Melbourne

Louise is an educator, arts historian, and curator. Her current research is focussed on the acquisition, assembly, and categorisation of prints collected by Elizabeth Seymour Percy, 1st Duchess of Northumberland (1716-1776). Her other research interests include English eighteenth-century furniture; the collection and display of prints; the material culture of the English country house; the commerce of collecting; and the history of the book. In 2018, Louise was the Harold Wright and Sarah and William Holmes Scholar at the Department of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum, London. She has also been awarded a Paul Mellon Research Support Grant and a Francis Haskell Memorial Fund Scholarship to undertake research in collections and archives in the UK, Europe and the USA. Louise’s recent publications include: “Marks and Meanings: Revealing the Hand of the Collector and “the Moment of Making” in two 18th-Century Print Albums”, Journal18, Fall, 2018; and a book chapter in Kerrianne Stone (ed.) Horizon Lines, Marking 50 Years of Print Scholarship, Melbourne, 2019. Louise’s research on English print rooms will be published in Eighteenth-Century Life (forthcoming, 2021).

Email: boxl@unimelb.edu.au

Corey Cribb

PhD candidate in Screen and Cultural Studies, School of Culture and Communication, The University of Melbourne

Corey Cribb specialises in film theory and the continental philosophy of film. Focusing on the film-philosophies of Gilles Deleuze and Jean-Luc Nancy, his research considers the potential of modern cinema to perpetuate the non-mediated transformation of the world and occasion the ontological renewal of thought, bodies and ways of being-in-the-world. In part, this involves a consideration of the palpable influence of Maurice Blanchot’s literary ontology upon these thinkers, and the subsequent question of why Deleuze and Nancy maintain that the marked passivity (or worklessness) of modern cinema harbours unprecedented potential for ontological change and the restoration of belief in a world from which we are said to be absent. Beyond the notion of worklessness as “the most essential – the most romantic and the most modern – gesture in romanticism” (Watt, 2017, pp. 18), Corey’s research connects with the concerns of the ERCC by seeking to show how some of the most ground breaking developments in film theory today bear the influence of debates which can be traced back to German Idealism.

Email: ccribb@student.unimelb.edu.au

Todd Dearing

PhD candidate in English Literature, Flinders University, Adelaide

Todd Dearing’s work focuses on Romantic ideas of the human and conceptions of imagination, creativity, and genius. He explores how these ideas impact upon contemporary literary criticism and contemporary ideas of the human. He is currently completing his doctorate thesis on the trope of the daimon in William Blake’s magnum opus, Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion, read as an allegory for literary practice. His broader research interests include English and German Romantic literature, art, and philosophy, (post)humanism, contemporary literary criticism, poetry, mythopoeia, and the links between psychology and literature. Todd is interested in the ERCC themes ‘Creativity, Critique, Comparison’ and ‘Actual, Mixed, and Virtual Realities’, and the ERCC research projects ‘Critique, Creativity, Innovation’, ‘William Blake and the History of Imagination’, and ‘Gothic Fictions’.

Email: todd.dearing@flinders.edu.au

Marguerite Gibson

PhD Candidate in Art Theory and History, School of Media, Arts and Social Inquiry, Curtin University

Marguerite Gibson focuses on nineteenth century Australian colonial art, particularly in relation to the themes of aesthetics, landscape and the emotional traditions of the sublime. Currently, her research project is investigating the utilization of the sublime through motifs, nuances and Australian landscape depiction within art, representing the emotional experiences of the historical period of the Gold Rush era, 1850-1900. Through the primary texts of Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant, along with the contemporary concept of the colonial sublime, she explores the relationship between these ideas, termed the Australian colonial sublime within the research. She currently has a book chapter forthcoming within Song of Death in Paradise: Death and Garden Narratives in Literature, Art and Film, edited by Feryal Cubukcu and Sabine Planka (Lexington Books), entitled “Wilderness Garden: Death, Landscape and the Australian Colonial Sublime”. Her research and interests relate to several ERCC themes, particularly Critique, Creativity, Comparison and Worldliness, Cosmopolitanism, Globalisation.

Email: m.gibson@postgrad.curtin.edu.au

Francesca Kavanagh

PhD candidate in English and Theatre Studies, School of Culture and Communication, The University of Melbourne

Francesca Kavanagh specialises in eighteenth and nineteenth-century women’s reading and writing practices with a focus on material culture. She is also interested in the gothic and cultures of celebrity and fandom from Romanticism to the present. Her current project examines practices of letter-writing, annotation, and commonplacing from a range of women writers throughout the long eighteenth century and pairs this archival material with fictional accounts of these practices by Samuel Richardson and Jane Austen to elucidate the ways in which women in the long eighteenth-century used these textual practices in the production of textual and virtual spaces of intimacy. She currently has a journal article forthcoming in The Australasian Journal of Victorian Studies entitled “‘Marianne Knight | Godmersham Park’: Inscription as Community Interface in the Books of Jane Austen’s Niece”. She is interested in a number of the ERCC’s current themes, including Actual Mixed and Virtual Realities and Worldliness, Cosmopolitanism, Globalisation, as well as opportunities for future collaborations.

Email: f.kavanagh@student.unimelb.edu.au

Tarek Makhlouf

PhD candidate in Arabic, Asia Institute, The University of Melbourne

Tarek researches the content and context of traditions of philology with a particular emphasis on the Arabic tradition. Philology here is used in the traditional sense of studying texts and thus encompasses a broad array of activities including grammar, codicology, hermeneutics (in its broad meaning), literary criticism, and history. Tarek reads these philological works embedded in their socio-intellectual context, often revealing counter-intuitive results. His current project investigates the flow of Arabic philological learning from Islamic Spain to Egypt and the Levant in the 13th and 14th centuries. While maintaining his interest in the breadth of the ERCC’s themes and activities, Tarek is focused on two themes: ‘Non-European Enlightenments and Romanticisms’ and ‘Worldliness, Cosmopolitanism, Globalisation’. He is also currently working with ERCC researchers to put together a seminar series on Islamic Enlightenments.

Email: tarekm@student.unimelb.edu.au

Belinda Scerri

PhD Candidate in Art History, School of Culture and Communication, The University of Melbourne

Belinda Scerri’s research explores French Rococo interior ornament, patronage and the ascendancy of ornémaniste artists in early eighteenth-century Paris. Her broader research interests include: the South Sea Bubble, Système Law and economic collapse of 1720 through an art historical lens; early modern collecting and commissioning cultures; mercantilism and the establishment of Royal manufactories; exoticism and cosmopolitanism in French Régence art and architecture. She is a founding member of the Centre of Visual Art (CoVA) doctoral academy and a 2019/2020 research fellow at the UCLA Center for Seventeenth and Eighteenth-Century Studies. She is currently writing a book chapter entitled ‘“Instructing herself by fad or fancy”: Depictions and Fictions of Female Connoisseurs in Eighteenth-century Paris’ which will appear in Portraits & Poses: Representations of Female Intellectual Authority, Agency and Authorship in Early Modern and Enlightenment Europe (Leuven and Cornell UP, 2020).

Email: bscerri@pgrad.unimelb.edu.au

Samuel Watts

PhD candidate and Teaching Associate, School of Historical and Philosophical Studies, The University of Melbourne

Samuel Watts researches and writes about the experiences of African Americans in the Deep South during Reconstruction. His focus is on how formerly enslaved people interpreted ideas of freedom and citizenship in violently contested urban spaces, while working to construct and maintain lasting communities and networks. Additionally, Samuel is broadly interested in the historical legacies of racial discourse in the US, Australia and beyond. He currently has a book chapter in peer-review, entitled: “Reconstruction Justice: African American Police Officers in Charleston and New Orleans,” in Freedom’s Gained and Lost: Reinterpreting Reconstruction in the Atlantic World, eds. Simon Lewis and Adam Domby (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019 – forthcoming). He is interested in a number of ERCC projects, most notably those focused on slavery, and has an ongoing interest in the legacies of Enlightenment thought in debates about race, citizenship and revolution.

Email: sjwatts@student.unimelb.edu.au

Burnard, Trevor. Britain in the Wider World, 1603-1800. Routledge, 2019.

Britain in the Wider World traces the remarkable transformation of Britain between 1603 and 1800 as it developed into a world power. At the accession of James VI and I to the throne of England in 1603, the kingdoms of England / Wales, Scotland and Ireland were united only by having a monarch in common. They had little presence in the world and were fraught with violence. Two centuries later, the consolidated state of the United Kingdom, established in 1801, was an economic powerhouse and increasingly geopolitically important, with an empire that stretched from the Americas, to Asia and to the Pacific. The book offers a fresh approach to assessing Britain's evolution, situating Britain within both imperial and Atlantic history, and examining how Britain came together politically and socially throughout the eighteenth century.

Gaston, Sean. Jacques Derrida and the Challenge of History. Rowman and Littlefield, 2019.

This important new book argues that Jacques Derrida's work can be treated as the basis for a distinctive historiography. The possibility of seeing Derrida not as a philosopher of language but as a philosopher of history has become more apparent with the recent publication of Derrida's 1964-1965 seminar Heidegger: The Question of Being and History. We now know that the problem of history was at the heart of Derrida's writing in the mid-1960s, prior to the publication of his best-known work, Of Grammatology (1967).

Arguing that Derrida's scholarship in the 1960s and early 1970s on historicism, historicity and the problem of history can be treated as the basis for a philosophy of history, Sean Gaston focuses on Derrida's work from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s and his relentless questioning of context, memory and narrative as the delineation of a deconstructive historiography.

Coleman, Deirdre. Henry Smeathman, the Flycatcher: Natural History, Slavery, and Empire in the Late Eighteenth Century. Liverpool University Press, 2018.

In 1771 Joseph Banks and other wealthy collectors sent a talented, self-taught naturalist to Sierra Leone to collect all things rare and curious, from moths to monkeys. Henry Smeathman's expedition to the West African coast, which coincided with a steep rise in British slave trading in this area, lasted four years during which time he built a house on the Banana Islands, married into the coast's ruling dynasties, and managed to negotiate the tricky life of a 'stranger' bound to his landlord and local customs. In this book, which draws on a rich and little-known archive of journals and letters, Coleman retraces Smeathman's life as he shuttled between his home on the Bananas and two key Liverpool trading forts - Bunce Island and the Isles de Los.

Ford, Thomas H. Wordsworth and the Poetics of Air. Cambridge University Press, 2018.

Before the ideas we now define as Romanticism took hold the word 'atmosphere' meant only the physical stuff of air; afterwards, it could mean almost anything, from a historical mood or spirit to the character or style of an artwork. Thomas H. Ford traces this shift of meaning, which he sees as first occurring in the poetry of William Wordsworth. Gradually 'air' and 'atmosphere' took on the new status of metaphor as Wordsworth and other poets re-imagined poetry as a textual area of aerial communication - conveying the breath of a transitory moment to other times and places via the printed page. Reading Romantic poetry through this ecological and ecocritical lens Ford goes on to ask what the poems of the Romantic period mean for us in a new age of climate change, when the relationship between physical climates and cultural, political and literary atmospheres is once again being transformed.

Chu, Petra and Milam, Jennifer (eds.,). Beyond Chinoiserie: Artistic Exchange Between China and the West During the Late Qing Dynasty (1796-1911). East and West series, Vol. 4. Brill, 2019.

The complex interweaving of different Western visions of China had a profound impact on artistic exchange between China and the West during the nineteenth century. Beyond Chinoiserie addresses the complexity of this exchange. While the playful Western “vision of Cathay” formed in the previous century continued to thrive, a more realistic vision of China was increasingly formed through travel accounts, paintings, watercolours, prints, book illustrations, and photographs.

Simultaneously, the new discipline of sinology led to a deepening of the understanding of Chinese cultural history. Leading and emerging scholars in the fields of art history, literary studies and material culture, have authored the ten essays in this book, which deal with artistic relations between China and the West at a time when Western powers’ attempts to extend a sphere of influence in China led to increasingly hostile political interactions.

Tuite, Clara (ed.,). Byron in Context. Cambridge University Press, 2019.

George Gordon, the sixth Lord Byron (1788-1824), was one of the most celebrated poets of the Romantic period, as well as a peer, politician and global celebrity, famed not only for his verse, but for his controversial lifestyle and involvement in the Greek War of Independence. In thirty-seven concise, accessible essays, by leading international scholars, this volume explores the social and intertextual relationships that informed Byron’s writing; the geopolitical contexts in which he travelled, lived and worked; the cultural and philosophical movements that influenced changing outlooks on religion, science, modern society and sexuality; the dramatic landscape of war, conflict and upheaval that shaped Napoleonic and post-Napoleonic Europe and Regency Britain; and the diverse cultures of reception that mark the ongoing Byron phenomenon as a living ecology in the twenty-first century. This volume illuminates how we might think of Byron in context, but also as a context in his own right.

Clemens, Justin and Bartlett, A. (eds.,). Badiou and His Interlocutors. Bloomsbury Academic, 2018.

This is a unique collection presenting work by Alain Badiou and commentaries on his philosophical theories. It includes three lectures by Badiou, on contemporary politics, the infinite, cinema and theatre and two extensive interviews with Badiou - one concerning the state of the contemporary situation and one wide ranging interview on all facets of his work and engagements. It also includes six interventions on aspects of Badiou’s work by established scholars in the field, addressing his concept of history, Lacan, Cinema, poetry, and feminism; and four original essays by young and established scholars in Australia and New Zealand addressing the key concerns of Badiou’s 2015 visit to the Antipodal region and the work he presented there.

With new material by Badiou previously unpublished in English this volume is a valuable overview of his recent thinking. Critical responses by distinguished and gifted Badiou scholars writing outside of the European context make this text essential reading for anyone interested in the development and contemporary reception of Badiou's thought.

Otto, Peter (ed.,). William Blake: Selected Works. Oxford University Press, 2018.

This volume in the 21st Century Oxford Authors series offers students and readers a comprehensive selection of the work of William Blake (1757-1827). Accompanied by full scholarly apparatus, this authoritative edition enables students to explore Blake’s poetry, illuminated poetry, and prose alongside selections from his letters, manuscripts, notebook, advertising pamphlets, marginalia, and works he printed in conventional letterpress.

The edition arranges Blake’s works in chronological order, according to the date when they were first printed or, in the case of unpublished works, the years in which they were composed. With the help of editorial headnotes and annotations, this arrangement brings to the foreground Blake’s material and intellectual labours as a poet, painter, prophet, and non-academic philosopher; the networks of acquaintances, friends, patrons, and enemies who helped support or provoke this work; and the tumultuous historical events he responded to, which included the beginning of modern feminism, the agricultural and industrial revolutions, the American and French Revolutions, William Pitt’s so-called ‘Reign of Terror’ in Britain, an attempted revolution in Ireland (1798), a successful slave rebellion in Haiti (1791-1804), and the French revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. Some editions attempt to sanitise Blake, by hiding from view the most startling elements of his thought; but in this edition Blake’s sexual, political, religious, and poetic heterodoxy comes into full view.