American Philosophical Society Fellow, June - July 2023
Home Institution: University of California, Los Angeles
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.
Project Title: House on Fire: The Cato Street Conspiracy
My current book project, “House on Fire: The Cato Street Conspiracy” is a work of non-fiction prose that uncovers the lost history of what I call multiracial radicalism in eighteenth-century and Romantic-era Britain. The Cato Street Conspiracy (1820) involved thirteen men whose plan to assassinate the Prime Minister and his cabinet ended in the execution of half those men and the transportation of the rest to Australia. Although this remarkable event has been overshadowed by more high-profile conflicts of the long eighteenth century—the Gordon Riots, the Peterloo Massacre, and the revolutions abroad—it is the definitive crisis of that era and an augury of our own. The story of Cato Street is a story of the British Empire at the crossroads of political modernity. It is about prisons and the police, about the forced marriage of the criminal and the colonist. It is also about the history of a decolonial imagination and the growing global movement against racial injustice. The questions that animate my research during my term at the IASH are: how did the coalition of abolitionist, anti-colonial, and Jacobin or pro-revolutionary sympathies that led to the events of 1820 come about? What role did a perception of Scotland as occupied by the English play in encouraging anti-colonial resistance even as Scotland continued to reap the rewards of the plantation economy? Most specifically, how did the relative diversity of matriculants in Scottish universities allow for these sorts of solidarities to form, and how did a wider network of learned societies and political clubs in Edinburgh and Glasgow nurture the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century radical tradition in both direct and indirect ways?