Everyone is warmly invited to this year's Susan Manning Memorial Lecture:
Prof. Anahid Nersessian (UCLA): House on Fire: On the Unfinished Business of Romanticism
(Booking via Eventbrite) 5.00pm, Fri 24 March, Lecture Theatre G.03, 50 George Square, followed by a reception.
This talk is about the vexed relationship between the revolutionary politics of the Romantic era and the moral catastrophe of slavery. Moving between a number of historical scenes, from the eighteenth and nineteenth century to the present day, it figures the Romantic period as a crossroads of political modernity, where we might uncover traces of anti-colonial practices with a shifting and multifaceted perspective on Enlightenment thought. The talk will bring together the lives and voices of Afro-Scots political radicals Robert Wedderburn and William Davidson; the literary and visual artist William Blake; the agrarian reformer Thomas Spence; and the poets and political thinkers Aimé Césaire and Dionne Brand to ask how we might view Romanticism as an unfinished emancipatory project, whose utopian ambitions are sometimes expressed, other times obstructed by its poetics.
The talk is free, but it is essential to book on Eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/susan-manning-memorial-lecture-2023-anahid-nersessian-tickets-525499492127
Anahid Nersessian is Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of three books, most recently Keats’s Odes: A Lover’s Discourse (2021), first published by the University of Chicago Press; a new edition was released in fall 2022 from Verso Books. Her first academic monograph, Utopia, Limited: Romanticism and Adjustment (Harvard, 2015) is about formal and political practices of renunciation and self-containment, while her second, The Calamity Form: On Poetry and Social Life (Chicago, 2020) takes up figurative perspectives on economic-ecological crisis. She writes regularly for The New York Review of Books, and her work has also appeared in both public and scholarly venues such as Critical Inquiry, ELH, European Romantic Review, the Keats-Shelley Journal, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Modern Language Quarterly, New Left Review, New Literary History, n+1, The Paris Review, PMLA, and Studies in Romanticism. She is the editor of the Broadview Press edition of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s long poem, Laon and Cythna; or, The Revolution of the Golden City and a former managing editor of the open-access journal Environmental Humanities, as well as a contributing editor at Parapraxis Magazine. With Nan Z. Da, she founded and co-edits the Thinking Literature imprint published by University of Chicago Press. She will be the American Philosophical Society Fellow at IASH for June - July 2023.