Hello Romanticists,

Thanks to everyone who made it on Wednesday! It was great to see you all, and meet some new Romanticists.

We’ll be meeting roughly every other week throughout the semester, sometimes as a reading group and sometimes as a working group. Each meeting will be on a Wednesday at 4:15pm. I’ll send out a location as soon as I have one. The schedule follows:

9/28: Reading group: selection from Alan Richardson’s “The Neural Sublime.” David will choose and pre-circulate a chapter, and will take the lead on the discussion. (Rosh Hashanah starts at sundown, but if we finish at 5:15, that shouldn’t be an issue — please correct me if I’m wrong.)

10/12: Working group: Gaby will pre-circulate her paper on Dorothy Wordsworth, which needs feedback to become publishable. We can probably work on up to two papers in a session, if anyone else has another paper that they’d like to workshop.

10/26: Working group: Several of us are going to ICR the next weekend. Wouldn’t it be nice if we finished our papers before going to Montreal?

11/9: Reading group: Details TK

12/7: Reading group: Details TK

As you can see, we’re still looking for input on the last two reading group dates. If anyone has a book or article that they’re particularly interested in discussing, please pipe up! You can get a feel for some recent publications in Romanticism here: http://www.nbol-19.org/

Texts that were mentioned at the meeting as potentially interesting include:

Samuel Baker’s “Written on the Water” http://www.nbol-19.org/view_doc.php?index=116

Ayse Celikkol’s “Romances of Free Trade” http://www.nbol-19.org/view_doc.php?index=160

Alexander Regier’s “Fracture and Fragmentation in British Romanticism” http://www.nbol-19.org/view_doc.php?index=117

Hsuan L. Hsu’s “Geography and the Production of Space in Nineteenth-Century American Literature” http://www.nbol-19.org/view_doc.php?index=117

The faculty group is still finalizing the seminar series for the year, and those announcements will go out shortly. But please do mark your calendars for 11/11 at 2pm, when we’ll be hosting Robert Miles!

Other business: I drafted a constitution for our DSC application, and will post it to the blog (romanticism.gc.cuny.edu) by the end of the day. Please take a look and make suggestions or edits in the comments. We’re still collecting signatures for the Chartered Organization Petition; if you want to gather your own, you can download and print signature pages here: http://www.cunydsc.org/sites/default/files/Charteredorg_petition.pdf and bring them to the next meeting. Or, better yet, bring the signatories themselves to the meeting!

And a final question for the group: I was thinking of ways to make our group more interdisciplinary. One way might be to have one “Work in Progress” talk each semester by an advanced graduate student at the GC in any field. We could solicit abstracts and pick a speaker as a group (I think we should attempt a blind selection process) — the speaker would get a line on his or her CV as well as valuable feedback and speaking experience, we would get a good window into other work being done at the GC, and hopefully the speaker would increase interest in the group in their own department. This would be in addition to the outside speakers brought in for the seminar series. What do you all think? Is this something you’d be interested in?

Yours in Romanticism,

Leila.