Matthew Sangster

The BARS President’s Fellowship is open to scholars from Black, Indigenous and other minority ethnic backgrounds working on any aspect of Romantic Studies to support research, teaching and/or public outreach expenses of up to £1500. Deadline 7th Nov 2025.
www.bars.ac.uk/main/index.p...

BARS 2026 First Book Prize: Calls for Nominations
Awarded biennially for the best first monograph in Romantic Studies, this prize is open to first monographs published between 1 January 2023 and 31 December 2025.
Deadline: 12th January 2026.
More info: www.bars.ac.uk/blog/?p=6174

Coleridge in 1809: 'In the present age (emphatically the age of personality!) there are more than ordinary motives for withholding all encouragement from this mania, of busying ourselves with the names of others, which is still more alarming as a symptom, than it is troublesome as a disease.'

Call for Papers and Sessions

Fantasy’s Present Pasts

University of Glasgow
Tuesday 23rd – Thursday 25th June 2026

Keynote Speakers: Stefan Ekman, Sofia Samatar and Helen Young

More details on the conference in the post linked below - deadline for proposals is Friday 12th December.

It is a great joke. I think Peter Conradi read the two authors as being divisions of the things Murdoch feared she was or was seen as. There's certainly some very self-aware exaggerations of her quirks.

I'd really recommend that you read The Black Prince in your Murdoch spree, but (if you haven't read it already) ideally only when you've read quite a few of her others, so you can appreciate what she's doing to herself!

Congratulations, Adrian! Hope the well-deserved pint was a good one.

I'm so looking forward to this panel discussion on Le Guin in November! Glasgow pals - be sure to get your tickets for this!

@mjrsangster.bsky.social

Towards the longer side of novella, but Piranesi and This is How You Lose the Time War? Sofia Samatar's The Practice, the Horizon and the Chain (although that's resistance to serious oppression)? Adrian Tchaikovsky's Elder Race? (Several of his would work.)

Huge thanks to all who attended the BARS 2025 Early Career and Postgraduates Conference! We had a wonderful time!

See you this Friday 12th Sept for the online portion of the conference!

We're delighted to be welcoming you to Cambridge for the start of the PGR & ECR Conference!

We hope you'll join us today at St John's College to view a selection of poetry highlights, with Romanticism at its heart, including treasures from Coleridge & Wordsworth.

@bars.bsky.social
#BARS2025

BARS Members will have received an email entitled "BARS Executive Elections 2025: Voting Information for Members".

Please read the statements of the candidates at the two links below and make your votes via the link in your email.

www.bars.ac.uk/blog/?p=6121
www.bars.ac.uk/blog/?p=6128

I feel like it's a series designed to start a whole series of conversations genre studies really needs, and was in many respects blocked from starting those conversations in the eighties.

To be fair, if you were going to do a semester-long course on one Fantasy series, that's one from which students would take a lot away. I have a PhD student working on Nevèrÿon at the moment who keeps finding new interesting angles.

Exhibition: Performing 19th Century Glasgow: Nation, Celebrity, Empire - Glasgow Life Exhibition on Glasgow Theatres

Glasgow pals, check out my new exhibition at the Mitchell Library on c19 theatre, empire, and celebrity! On display thru October. I'm also giving a talk at the Mitchell on race and c19 theatre on October 4 😊 www.glasgowlife.org.uk/event/1/exhi...

Will be interested to see what you make of Titus Alone. It's very different, and I think deliberately so. There are some really interesting drafts at the BL where he starts feeling it out in a form that's almost like a Samuel Beckett script.

So fan fiction is specific, but so is Roman epic. That's not to say that both can't cross cultures in weird and unexpected ways, though, or that some forms aren't more grounded in their specific circumstances than others.

I think the useful part of the 'Virgil wrote Fan Fiction' thing is that it pushes against a geniuses-and-others model and towards one that recognises all culture is relational - a tissue of quotations, as Barthes puts it - and that's a good thing (and a thing genre's refreshingly honest about).

The book touches on this at various points - I found Colin Burrow's book on the older sense of imitation illuminating for thinking about how senses of appropriate relationality have changed over time. Will take a look at the Jordan post - I enjoyed your writing on Peake, who's one of my faves.

I think it's more interesting to say that fan fiction is a form that freely admits its intertextuality (cultural as well as literary), in a way that more self-consciously literary works have been cautious about post-Romanticism, but which is common in older literature and very important in genre.

I think that's a South Korean subgenre - Dallergut Dream Department Store etc?

The British Association for Romantic Studies Biennal International Conference 2026 - Romantic Retrospection
In-person: Wednesday 29th–Friday 31st July 2026
Online Conference: Thursday 6th August 2026

Updates & CfP announced:

www.birmingham.ac.uk/events/arts-...

[Image: Birmingham Museums Trust]

The Ronald Blythe Fellowship is John Clare Society's new scheme awarding a PhD student focusing on Clare a £1000 bursary to support their work.
Please pass on - &/or contact me or Honorary Secretary of the Society, Karen Lakey, for further information:
johnclaresociety.wordpress.com/contact-us/

Congratulations, Rhys! If you fancy doing a Five Questions interview for the BARS Blog to raise awareness, please just drop me an email.

The University of Glasgow’s Centre for Robert Burns Studies is offering a PhD scholarship on “Robert Burns & the Environment” – part of a new research strand on Burns, the Environment & Sustainable Cultural Heritage

DEADLINE 18 AUGUST
#C18th #Romanticism
www.gla.ac.uk/scholarships...

Congratulations!

Adrian Tchaikovsky's Elder Race uses two POVs very effectively.

BARS Executive Elections 2025: Call for Nominations – deadline 22nd August
BARS invites self-nominations from those who would like to stand for positions on the Executive.

More information: www.bars.ac.uk/blog/?p=6083
Description of roles: www.bars.ac.uk/blog/?p=6081

BARS First Book Prize: Call for Expressions of Interest in Serving on the Judging Panel
BARS invites expressions of interest from Romanticists who would like to serve on the judging panel for the next BARS First Book Prize.
More information here: www.bars.ac.uk/blog/?p=6086

The Word for World is Forest. The Overstory. Lord of the Rings.