Abstracts & Speakers

Click here to download a booklet of abstracts and speaker profiles ahead of the conference.

Please download the file - when viewing in Google Docs the formatting isn't aligned.
 

 

Keynote Speakers

Dr Sarah Haggarty (Newcastle University)

Sarah Haggarty is a Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century and Romantic Literature in the Department of English Literature at Newcastle University. Prior to this position, she was Janice Scott Junior Research Fellow in English at University College, Oxford, and has taught at Southampton and Cambridge Universities. She is currently Newcastle University’s School's Liaison Officer and is responsible for managing the relationship between the English Literature section and Newcastle University’s Partner Schools.

Sarah works in the field of eighteenth-century and Romantic-period British literature and culture. Her recent publications include the monograph Blake's Gifts: Poetry and the Politics of Exchange (CUP, 2010), which was nominated for the CCUE book prize in 2011, and an article on William Cowper and the tempo of letter writing in Eighteenth-Century Life (2011), and a readers' guide to Blake's Songs, co-written with Jon Mee. Currently she is working an article addressing free gifts in Pierre Nicole, Mandeville, and Turgot, and a second on Thomas Bewick, John Clare, and natural history.

Her next book project, which is provisionally entitled Economies of Time in Long-C18th Writing, and will consider heterogeneous temporalities and how they are represented in almanacs, amatory fiction, it-narratives, and poetry by Young, Cowper, Smart, Goldsmith, and Blake.

Dr John Holmes (University of Reading)

John Holmes is a Senior Lecturer in English literature at Reading University. He is Programme Director for degrees in English Literature, co-convenor of the MA module Modern English Studies (nineteenth-century) and liaison officer for English and History of Art and Fine Art.

His primary research interest is nineteenth- and twentieth-century British and American poetry from the Romantics to the present day. He has specific interests in literature and science, particularly evolutionary theory; poetic form, including the sonnet and the epic; and Victorian intellectual culture and aesthetics, including the relationship between literature and the visual arts. He has also worked on Renaissance culture, particularly poetry. John held a Leverhulme Research Fellowship to work on Darwinism, poetry and poetics from 2006 to 2008, and is currently working on a new project on the Pre-Raphaelites and science.

John is also working with colleagues in Biology, History, French and English on an AHRC-funded project to see what biologists make of research on biology by scholars in the humanities. (http://blogs.reading.ac.uk/cultivating-common-ground/).