‘Romantic Making and Unmaking’: BARS 2024 International Conference Report
By Cleo O'Callaghan Yeoman, Universities of Stirling, Glasgow, and Edinburgh
Earlier this year, between 23–25 July and 1–2 August 2024, the British Association for Romantic Studies (BARS) hosted its biennial International Conference, titled ‘Romantic Making and Unmaking’. Over the course of five days in July (comprising three days of panels, plus the option to attend the Byron Society’s Annual Scotland Lecture and an excursion on the days either side), we were delighted to welcome over 250 in-person delegates to the University of Glasgow and over 60 further speakers online the following week.
Reflecting now on the conference as a whole, one of the main things that stands out is the sheer variety, and resultant richness, of the conference programme. In Glasgow, and subsequently online, delegates were spoilt for choice on a daily basis when deciding which panels to attend. Panel topics included, but were by no means limited to, ideas of legacy, tradition, innovation, time, paratexts, reputation, literary modes, and nation. Attention was given to canonical and non-canonical figures alike, from perspectives that variously examined questions of gender, the environment, disability, and more. Highlights included, for example, an early panel titled ‘Scottish Women Writers in and out of the Marketplace’, which forefronted understudied female authors (including Susan Ferrier and Jane and Charlotte Waldie) and their contributions to contemporary travel writing and manuscript circulation, and an online panel titled “Romanticism and the Making of Modern ‘Disability’”, which considered the works of less peripheral authors, such as Walter Scott and William Wordsworth, in relation to race, injury, and belonging. Attention was also given to ongoing textual editing projects (centring on figures such as Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Pierce Egan, John Galt, Ann Radcliffe, and Mary Wollstonecraft), and to the findings of recently AHRC-funded projects, including Books and Borrowing and Curious Travellers, among others.
Inside the University of Glasgow’s Chapel during the performance of Robert Burns’ The Jolly Beggars (1818). Image source: Cleo O’Callaghan Yeoman.
Many of these themes and areas of focus were reflected in the conference’s six plenary sessions. Special thanks are due to Jeff Cowton, John Gardner, Michelle Levy, Fiona Stafford, Eugenia Zuroski, and to the plenary roundtable speakers, Elizabeth Edwards, Tim Fulford, Craig Lamont, and Alison Lumsden (in absentia), for preparing and delivering such an inspiring, wide-ranging, and critically-stimulating series of discussions. Each plenary provided a unifying moment in the conference programme, allowing delegates collectively to consider the conference’s broader themes and implications, while also contemplating prospective avenues for future investigation. Gardner, for example, provided compelling insights into the interdisciplinary value of combining literary studies and engineering, while the textual editing plenary roundtable thoughtfully incorporated individual reflections (and, in some cases, memorable anecdotes) on the challenges of editing alongside generous pointers and advice for prospective, or less experienced, editors. The conference’s hybrid model provided, moreover, welcome opportunities for delegates to continue and to embark on new conversations, all the while fostering a genuinely international feeling of camaraderie and shared intellectual endeavour.
Inside the Òran Mór during the conference dinner. Image source: Cleo O’Callaghan Yeoman.
Beyond the panels themselves, delegates enjoyed multiple opportunities to engage with Glasgow’s heritage and culture more broadly. Such opportunities included a reception at the resplendent Glasgow City Chambers (at which the 2024 BARS First Book Prize was awarded to Stephanie O’Rourke), a conference dinner at Òran Mór (a local institution, featuring a ceiling mural painted by the late Alasdair Gray, pictured above), and a special performance of Robert Burns’ The Jolly Beggars (1818), performed in the University Chapel by the Glasgow University Chapel Choir and the Scottish Opera Community Choir. Some delegates also opted to join a day trip to New Lanark, previously an eighteenth-century mill village, and today a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Those of us who went enjoyed a sunny stroll up to the Falls of the Clyde, famously admired by William and Dorothy Wordsworth during their tour of Scotland in 1803, and painted by J. M. W. Turner in 1801 (see below).
Turner’s The Falls of the Clyde. Image Source: National Galleries Scotland.
Before concluding, I’d like to take the opportunity to thank once again all of the publishers, associations, and societies that contributed to ‘Romantic Making and Unmaking’ and, in doing so, made it vastly more accessible to the BARS PGR and ECR community. They are: AM Digital, ASLS, Bloomsbury, Boydell & Brewer, Cambridge University Press, the Charles Lamb Society, Edinburgh University Press, the John Clare Society, Liverpool University Press, Palgrave, Studies in Romanticism, Romanticism on the Net, and Wordsworth Grasmere.
Overall, ‘Romantic Making and Unmaking’ comprised an extremely convivial, productive, and academically revitalising couple of weeks, paving the way for new research enquiries and debates for us all to reflect and report back on before too long. In the meantime, and on a related note, do check the BARS website and social media accounts for announcements regarding the forthcoming 2025 BARS PGR and ECR Conference and the 2026 BARS International Conference. We look forward to seeing many of you there!
About the Author
Cleo O’Callaghan Yeoman is an AHRC-funded PhD researcher in English Literature at the Universities of Stirling, Glasgow, and Edinburgh. Her thesis analyses the relationships between novel reading and ideas of 'improvement' in Scotland between the years 1800 and 1837. Her broader research interests include novelistic intertextuality, Scottish Enlightenment philosophy, and the intersections between drama and the novel. Cleo has published in The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation and The Burney Journal. She is also Newsletter Editor for the Romance, Revolution and Reform journal and the Early Career Representative for the British Association for Romantic Studies (BARS).