We are delighted to announce our keynote speakers:

Anne-Lise François is associate professor of English and Comparative Literature at UC-Berkeley. Her first book, Open Secrets: The Literature of Uncounted Experience (Stanford UP), identified an ethos of recessive fulfillment and contented non-actualization in novels by Madame de Lafayette and Jane Austen and poems by Wordsworth, Dickinson, and Hardy, declining capitalist modernity’s demands everywhere to make time productive. Open Secrets was awarded the ACLA’s 2010 René Wellek Prize. Her current book project, Provident Improvisers: Parables of Subsistence in the Time of Enclosures, traces the contradictory logic of modern capitalism’s ways of enclosing time and stocking reserves, and looks to alternative ways of living “without reserves,” or in relation to seasonal time, in various parables of subsistence found in Sappho, Bashō, Rousseau, Wordsworth, Clare, Constable, Thoreau, Benjamin, and Berger. Essays related to the book have appeared in the collection Anthropocene Reading and in the journals Qui Parle, Essays in Romanticism, Minnesota Review, and Postmodern Culture.

Marlene Daut is professor of African Diaspora Studies in the Carter G. Woodson Institute at the University of Virginia. She specializes in early Caribbean, 19th-century African American, and early modern French colonial literary and historical studies. Her first book, Tropics of Haiti: Race and the Literary History of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, 1789-1865, was published in 2015 by Liverpool University Press’ Series in the Study of International Slavery. Her second book, Baron de Vastey and the Origins of Black Atlantic Humanism, was published in 2017 from Palgrave Macmillan’s series in the New Urban Atlantic. She is working on a collaborative project entitled An Anthology of Haitian Revolutionary Fictions (Age of Slavery). Daut is co-creator and co-editor of H-Net Commons’ digital platform H-Haiti, and she has developed an online bibliography of fictions of the Haitian Revolution from 1787 to 1900 at the website http://haitianrevolutionaryfictions.com.

 

The University of Manchester’s John Rylands Library (pictured above) is located on Deansgate, three blocks from the main conference venue. Conference delegates will have an opportunity to learn about its Romanticism-related holdings during the pre-conference cultural encounter day on July 30th, and the library is open to the public on most days until 5pm. The library holds a large collection of materials related to the Peterloo massacre.