By Gabriela Minden
Upon delving into the second edition of Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads (1800) for the first time, I was struck by the disparity between the Lucy poems and the rest of the collection. The Lucy poems are elegiac, written about a mysterious female figure whose nature seems to change from poem to poem, and they seem to constitute their own corpus that does not quite mesh with the other poems in the collection. In hopes of clarification, I turned to Coleridge’s explanation of his and Wordsworth’s artistic goals in composing Lyrical Ballads. Continue reading “On First Looking into…The Lucy Poems”
Online and Off Kilter: Navigating the Online Classroom
In my composition class this semester, we’ve been talking a lot about education: teaching methods, evaluation, structure, etc. There’s a new documentary out called Ivory Tower, and, though I haven’t seen it yet, we read a few articles about it in class, like “The Hi-Tech Mess of Higher Education,” which links panic over the value of education to increasing emphasis on technology. It’s not new or surprising to say that online education is on the rise. More instructors are offering online classes, and more students are electing to take them. Not only will they allow you to pursue your education from anywhere with an internet connection, but many of them will allow you to have a flexible schedule as well. Personally, I will probably always prefer the traditional classroom setting (and my current students told me they would, too), but there are undeniable benefits to an online course, alongside many challenges for those of used to the face-to-face interaction with students and/or teachers. Continue reading “Online and Off Kilter: Navigating the Online Classroom”
NGSC at ICR
Support the NGSC at ICR2014 in Minneapolis! The following is a list of NASSR Graduate Student Caucus Members presenting this week:
Thursday, September 25:
2.30-3.45p–Romanticism Confronts Slavery Panel (Hall of Avenues I Room)
Deanna Koretsky (Duke U)–“Habaeas Corpus and the Politics of Freedom: Slavery, Sentiment, and Romantic Suicide” Continue reading “NGSC at ICR”
A Romanticist as Curator
Introduction: I spent the better part of this summer—and the final months of my time as graduate curatorial fellow at the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art—conceiving, planning, and executing my first art exhibition, Ecological Looking: Sustainability & the End(s) of the Earth. In this post, to open my blogging for the 2014-15 academic year, I detail how in curating the show I sought to mobilize the skills and expertise with which I’ve been endowed as a romanticist, generally, and aspiring William Blake studies scholar, more specifically. In doing so, I hope less to merely chronicle my own experience than to open up other possibilities of engagement for graduate students training in the field. I mean this especially with an eye toward curatorial work, an aspect of the academic and museum profession I believe a number of graduate students in the caucus might have a great deal to contribute (and which, of course, the NGSC alumnus Kirstyn Leuner already has). Continue reading “A Romanticist as Curator”
Guest Post: Songs of Urban Innocence and Experience
By Katherine Magyarody
I was recently chatting to a friend about the NASSR Graduate Student Caucus and the suggestion that posts could include original poetry. It is an exciting prospect, but also vexing. What might contemporary poetry on a Romanticist blog look like? If someone wrote something similar in tone to Keats’s early faux-Spenserian verse would anyone find value in it? Did it have to be an Ode? Was there anything in our proximity as remote and beautiful as the Lake District? Looking around, I nearly concluded that the world is too much with us. Continue reading “Guest Post: Songs of Urban Innocence and Experience”
Why Franklin's Ship Matters to Romanticists
I was excited to learn, earlier today, that a Canadian marine expedition has located one of Sir John Franklin’s ships on the Arctic seabed, after a 160-year search for material evidence of the ill-fated Victorian voyage to find, chart, and claim the Northwest Passage. One archaeologist, William Battersby, has described the recent find as “the biggest archaeological discovery the world has seen since the opening of Tutankhamun’s tomb almost 100 years ago.” The ship, now resting on the sea floor, seems to have been preserved in fairly good condition, and the searchers hope to find artifacts from the voyage — perhaps even photographs — on board.
Call for Papers: NASSR 2015
The topic for this year’s conference, in Winnipeg, Canada, is “Romanticism and Rights.” See the full call for papers here: http://nassr2015.wordpress.com/cfp/. Proposals for individual papers are due on January 17, 2015.
Call for NGSC Bloggers 2014-2015
Dear NASSR Graduate Students and Advisers of Romantic Studies Graduate Students:
The NASSR Graduate Student Caucus (NGSC) invites applications for new bloggers for the 2014-2015 academic year. We ask that NGSC bloggers commit to contributing about 1 post per month (or about 8-10 total per year) and to serving through September 2015. Continue reading “Call for NGSC Bloggers 2014-2015”
Laura Moriarty and Geologic Motions
I recently had the pleasure of visiting Art.Science.Gallery – a fresh and inventive place that is nestled in Austin’s Canopy Studios of artists, musicians, galleries and other creative spaces. Hayley Gillespie, Ph.D., the founder of the gallery, is an ecologist and artist with a specialization in endangered salamanders. Though the mission for the gallery is to exhibit art merged with science, Gillespie and her team incorporate events and lectures that help to promote science literacy and increase communication between other scientists, artists, and the public. It’s hard not to be smitten with a gallery that also has a Laboratory for classes – but not a typical art class listing. This summer at Art.Science.Gallery, you can register for Climate Science 101. Continue reading “Laura Moriarty and Geologic Motions”
How to Keep On Keepin' On
PhDs in the humanities take a long time. Even optimistically we in English expect at least five years, and most statistics suggest our degrees take seven or eight–and that’s in addition to the time spent on an MA. A lot of life happens in those years, both to us and to the people we care about and care for: marriages, divorces, births, deaths, accidents, health complications, financial troubles, moving across the country…the list goes on. Every single graduate student I know has dealt with one or more of these major life changes in the course of our PhD years, and I can tell you (and you can probably concur) that sometimes it’s really hard to keep on keepin’ on. I’m sure we have all asked ourselves at least once whether it would be easier just to quit school and pursue a different career, especially when other folks in our lives might be asking us the same thing. Continue reading “How to Keep On Keepin' On”