The British Association for Romantic Studies (BARS) International Conference 2026

Romantic retrospection

In-person: Wednesday 29 – Friday 31 July 2026

University of Birmingham, Edgbaston Campus, Birmingham

Keynote speakers

• Ruth Abbott (University of Cambridge)
• Richard Cronin (University of Glasgow)
• Mary Favret (Johns Hopkins University)

Online conference: Thursday 6 August 2026

• Keynote: Nikki Hessell (Victoria University of Wellington, Te Herenga Waka)

The British Association for Romantic Studies’ 2026 International Conference will take as its theme Romantic Retrospection. The Romantic period has frequently been associated with newness, whether that’s its poets ushering in a new age reflective of a new spirit, moral and political philosophies associated with emerging notions of modern government and the self in relation to others, visions of utopian and dystopian futures, or a deeper appreciation for and sense of responsibility towards the natural world. Yet one of the contradictions and therefore abiding instincts of Romanticism is the way its writers, artists, and thinkers invariably performed a double move: looking and moving forward by glancing and turning back. Romantics saw and even defined themselves in relation to what had come before, tried to understand and explore the present by means of the past, contemplated their own past lives and selves as well as cultural and national memory, shaped their works out of a multitude of traditions and inheritances to which they remained admiring and indebted as well as sceptical. If Romantics sometimes register the burden of the past, they equally express and find in it forms of license and freedom. The influence of the Romantics, in turn, cast a spell over subsequent generations, who had to wrestle with a powerful artistic legacy. Literary criticism, meanwhile, has long been embroiled in reevaluating Romanticism, and its continuing relevance to or place within the academy.

We invite contributions on any aspect of Romantic Retrospection in relation to the writing, culture, institutions, practices, and criticism of the Romantic period. Topics that papers might address could include (but are not limited to):

• Romantic biography and autobiography
• Editing, anthologising, and reviewing
• Romanticism and the Classical world
• Romantic period reception of and responses to the early modern and eighteenth century
• Personal, local, national, and cultural pasts
• Vision and revision; rewriting and revisiting
• Change and conservation; memory and nostalgia
• Forms of attention and the role of the senses
• Tradition and renovation, especially formal and stylistic
• Influence and inheritance; allusion and echo
• The formation and reformation of canons, taste, and aesthetics
• Histories of places, institutions, and practices
• Loss, grief, and elegy
• Science and technology
• The Romantic sense of history and the history of the period
• The Romantic sense of the future and the future of Romantic studies
• Romantic legacies

Conference exhibition

2026 marks the centenary of the publication of the thirteen-book version of William Wordsworth’s The Prelude. The poem, completed by the poet in 1805, was unearthed and edited by the University of Birmingham Professor, Ernest de Selincourt. Its appearance in 1926 has shaped a century of Romantic studies. The conference will feature an exhibition of de Selincourt’s papers from the University of Birmingham’s Cadbury Archives, which will also be made available online.

Excursion

The conference will include an optional excursion to The Samuel Johnson Birthplace Museum and Bookshop, just north of Birmingham at Lichfield.

Further particulars and paper proposals

The conference invites both in person and online participation. There will be a three-day in-person event at the University of Birmingham with a digital event the following week. The in-person conference will not be streamed, but participants will be encouraged to upload recordings of their papers, which will be made available in a digital archive accessible to both in-person and online participants for a limited time.

We invite two kinds of proposal: for individual papers and for full sessions. We are also happy to facilitate session calls.

Individual papers: to submit a proposal for a 15-20-minute paper, please send the following information to bars2026@contacts.bham.ac.uk.

• an abstract of no more than 250 words
• a biographical note of up to 100 words
• your contact details
• any dietary requirements
• any accessibility requirements
• whether the paper is offered for the online or in-person events (please also indicate your time zone if submitting a proposal for the online conference)

Session proposals: sessions may take the form of traditional 3-4 person panels, with papers of 15-20-minutes each, or a series of shorter contributions in the form of a roundtable. To submit a proposal for a full session, please send the following information to bars2026@contacts.bham.ac.uk.

• session title
• a description of the theme (around 250 words)
• a list of participants and their email addresses
• brief outlines for each paper (around 100-150 words)
• individual session participants should each indicate any dietary and accessibility information
• whether the session is offered for the online or in-person events (please also indicate your time zone if online)

Session calls: if you would like us to help facilitate putting together a potential session by circulating details to others, please email us directly with a title and description (of 250 words) by Monday 29 September 2025, specifying whether your proposal is for an in-person or an online session. We will post accepted proposals along with your contact details on the conference website soon after; potential participants can then get in touch with you directly so that you can submit full details ahead of the conference deadline (Sunday 30 November).

The deadline for submissions for individual papers and full panels is Sunday 30 November 2025. Delegates will be notified of acceptance in January 2026.

Listed below are calls for panel contributions for the 2026 Conference. If you would like to send out a similar call for contributions, please write to the conference organisers at: bars2026@contacts.bham.ac.uk

Letitia Elizabeth Landon and the poetics of retrospection, BARS Birmingham 2026

Convenor: Emily Rohrbach, University of Durham

This in-person session invites proposals for papers addressing the conference topic of retrospection in the poetry and/or prose writing of Letitia Elizabeth Landon. Themes of personal and/or historical pasts, loss, grief, regret, forgetting; the pleasures and/or pains of memory; subjectivity and the processes of retrospection and anticipation; comparisons between Landon and other Romantics vis-à-vis retrospection; Landon’s relations to authors from previous generations (e.g. the eighteenth century, the Classical world).

Please send a proposal of 250 words and a very brief bio by 14 November 2025 to emily.rohrbach@durham.ac.uk. Informal inquiries prior to this deadline are also welcome.

Repetitions and innovations in late German Romanticism

Convenor: Joanna Neilly, St. Peter’s, Oxford

In the final poem of Heinrich Heine’s ‘Lyrical Intermezzo’ (1827) the poet asks for a coffin in which to bury the old songs of German Romanticism that inspired youthful dreams, which in turn occasioned adult disappointment. In an irony typical of Heine, this desire to kill off songs is placed within the wider project of his own Book of Songs. And having called for the death of the Romantic song, twenty years later Heine claims to have written ‘perhaps the last free woodland song of Romanticism’ (veilleicht das letzte / Freie Waldlied der Romantik) in his mock epic Atta Troll (1847). In this panel, papers will address how the writers of Spätromantik (German Late Romanticism) overcame the tenacious hold of seemingly worn-out Romantic forms, tropes, and motifs, repurposing them for innovative political, cultural, or aesthetic critique. The folk song; the overdetermined Gothic plot; figures such as the wanderer, the postilion, the beautiful muse; Romantic transcendence itself; are all, by the late 1810s onwards, at risk of becoming mere ciphers for a highly commercialised literary mood. This panel will investigate how and why writers who came belatedly to the Romantic scene, born too late to be among the earliest innovators of the Jena circle, nonetheless found ways of reinventing Romanticism, even if paradoxically through repetition.

Please send a proposal of 250 words and a very brief bio by 14 November 2025 to joanna.neilly@mod-langs.ox.ac.uk. Informal inquiries prior to this deadline are also welcome.

Creative-critical writing and Romantic studies

Convenor: Adam Neikirk

This session would consider, broadly, the role and status of creative-critical writing in Romantic studies. “Creative-critical” refers to a range of writing practices that center on a literary text or texts: defined by Peter Wilson as “creative writing not in response to text, creative writing in response to text, critical-creative re-writing, critical writing in response to text, critical writing not in response to text” (“Creative writing and critical response” 440). Such writing can take on many forms—almost infinitely many—but for that reason, perhaps, its place in the ever-shifting landscape of Romantic studies might be more obscure than the thoroughgoing article or monograph, even if it has “profound pedagogical payoffs” for in the teaching of Romantic works (Rachel Feder, “Zonkey Romanticism”).

This session therefore invites both artists and scholars to consider submitting both creative-critical pieces, written in response to Romantic literary texts or other Romantic works, as well as papers that consider the role of such writing in Romantic studies from a meta-disciplinary perspective. Of course, cross-pollination is welcome. Possible subthemes include but are not limited to:

• Creative-critical writing as a pedagogical or liberational tool;
• Versification of Romantic prose; & “prosifying” Romantic verse;
• The use of history/biography/time/space in creative writing;
• Romantic literature as therapy/creative response as therapy;
• Contemporary creative-critical responses to Romanticism;
• Romantic creative-critical responses to contemporaneity;
• Romanticism, creative-critical writing, and parasocial relationships;
• Creative-critical writing and Romantic literary coteries;
• Creative-critical writing and Romantic cultures.

Please send a proposal of 250 words and a very brief bio by 14 November 2025 to adamneikirk@gmail.com. Informal inquiries prior to this deadline are also welcome.

Writing history in the Romantic era

Convenor: Flávia Varella, Federal University of Sata Catarina, Brazil

This in-person session seeks to bring together scholars interested in how history was written, imagined, and theorized during the Romantic era. The session focuses on historians and historiographical works, inviting contributions that explore the conceptual, methodological, and institutional dimensions of Romantic historiography, its intellectual networks, and its audiences.

We welcome analyses of both canonical and lesser-known historians, as well as studies addressing transnational dialogues, formal innovations, responses to eighteenth-century ideas, and engagements with the classical tradition, among other possible approaches. The session also encourages papers examining historical works aimed at adult or juvenile audiences, including those situated at the intersection between historiography and the history of education.

Please send a proposal of 250 words and a brief bio by 14 November 2025 to flavia_varella@hotmail.com. Informal inquiries prior to this deadline are also welcome.

Panel for Charles and Mary Lamb Society (in-person)

Convenor: Dr Felicity James, University of Leicester

The Charles Lamb Society invites proposals for 20-minute papers on the writings of Charles and Mary Lamb and their circle. We would be interested in paper topics that deal with the conference theme of 'retrospection', a peculiarly Elian topic. We look forward to celebrating the launch of volumes I (Works 1818) and III (Essays and Last Essays of Elia) of the Collected Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, ed. Gregory Dart, at the conference, and panellists are invited to address any aspect of their work.

The Charles Lamb Society is also pleased to offer a number of bursaries for PGR/ECR delegates presenting papers on the Lambs. If you wish to be considered for a bursary, please indicate this with your proposal.

Please send paper proposals of c. 150 words to Felicity James at fj21@leicester@ac.uk by Friday 12 December 2025.

Further updates will be posted on this site in due course. General enquiries may be directed to the conference email account: bars2026@contacts.bham.ac.uk.