What Are You Reading?: Nikki Hessell
Welcome to a new series of posts on the K-SAA Blog entitled ‘What are you reading?’
We want to use this space to support and encourage discussions relating to the latest Romantic-period scholarship, especially those publications (online and in print) concerned with the second generation of Romantic writers: Keats, the Shelleys, Byron, and their circles. Initially we will be asking Romanticism scholars about new and recent work that they might have encountered that will be of interest to our followers, and then we’ll give them the chance to comment on some of their favorite studies in general. We also want to know about what they might be reading more broadly – contemporary poetry, perhaps, or a new novel…
Our next interviewee is Nikki Hessell, Associate Professor of English at Victoria University of Wellington. Her most recent monograph is Romantic Literature and the Colonised World: Lessons from Indigenous Translations (Palsgrave 2018). She is also the author of Literary Authors, Parliamentary Reporters: Johnson, Coleridge, Hazlitt, Dickens (Cambridge University Press 2012) and numerous articles on eighteenth-century and Romantic texts and writers. She is currently working on a very exciting project about Romantic poetry and Indigenous diplomacy, supported by a grant from the Marsden Fund.
What new studies of Romantic literature are you reading right now?
I was lucky enough to read the manuscript of Katherine Bergren's The Global Wordsworth recently, and it is a really exciting project that opens up new horizons for Romantic studies. To be honest, I don't actually read a lot of Romantic scholarship these days! I'm more and more interested in learning from other fields, especially Indigenous studies.
Does this writing inform your current research and/or teaching?
Kate's book is definitely influencing both my research and teaching, as it relates to thinking of Romanticism globally and outside canonical pathways. I'm about to start writing some reflective work on teaching Wordsworth, and The Global Wordsworth had helped with that immensely.
What’s the critical book that figured most significantly in your PhD thesis/first monograph/most recent monograph?
In Romantic Literature and the Colonised World,I tried to keep Linda Tuhiwai Smith's Decolonizing Methodologies in mind all the time. I fell way short of the model she outlines, but without that book, I wouldn't have even thought to produce a monograph like the one I did.
What books are in your 'to read next' pile right now? (poetry, fiction, theory, anything!)
I've just got my copy of Alicia Elliott's A Mind Spread Out on the Ground, which I'm so excited about. And I haven't yet read Noelani Arista's The Kingdom and the Republic but am really looking forward to it.
What books are on your night table or desk?
Travis Chi Wing Lau's brand new chaplet The Bone Setter and Witi Ihimaera's 1998 novel Bulibasha (KSAA people probably know the film Whale Rider, which was based on an Ihimaera novel, but Bulibasha is at least as good.)
Which book do you most frequently recommend to your students? Which students? Why?
In terms of Romantic scholarship, I always recommend Manu Samriti Chander's Brown Romantics and Robbie Richardson's The Savage and the Modern Self. In fact, I've recommended these so often that I've ended up lending out my personal copies to students, because our library copies are always out!
Have there been any mainstream articles or publications on the Romantics you’d like to draw our attention to?
That's a tough question! In some ways, the Romantics are such common currency in the Anglosphere that it feels like they're everywhere. I guess my answer would be that I find the most interesting and lively thinking about Romanticism on Twitter, and not always from people who are scholars or academics.