BARS Digital Symposium: Expanding Queer Romanticisms

The K-SAA looks forward to this exciting symposium by our friends at BARS!
Please find their event announcement below.

25th July 2025, 3pm - 6.15pm BST

About the Symposium

This symposium brings together scholars working on all aspects of queer Romanticism, from the theoretical to the historical, and generates a discussion on the future of the field. By taking a broad approach to definitions of queerness, we will discuss Romanticism in relation to liminality, non-normative genders and transgressive sexualities. With papers discussing everything from atoms, plants and snakes to Romantic theatre, women’s Gothic and challenges to settler-colonialism, this event provides a focal point for work on queer Romanticism that is often hidden within other fields.

The symposium is open to all BARS members – a Zoom link will be circulated to the membership ahead of the event.  If you would like to attend, you can join BARS here.

Programme

All times given are in BST (UTC+1:00)

15:00 – 15:10: Welcome and Opening Remarks

15:10 – 16:30: Panel 1: Deviations

Chair: Matthew Sangster

James Metcalf – Queering the Clinamen: Ann Yearsley’s Atoms and the Poetics of the Possible

Rebekah Musk – ‘A Flower’s Life’: Rethinking Queer Temporalities in Letitia Elizabeth Landon’s ‘A History of the Lyre’

Matteo Schiavone – ‘She Weepeth On Eternally’: Reading Letitia Elizabeth Landon’s Abandoned Women as Queer Characters

Greta Colombani – Queering the Snake Woman: Non-Normative Identities and Desires in John Keats’s ‘Lamia’ and Letitia Elizabeth Landon’s ‘The Fairy of the Fountains’

16:30 – 17:00: Break

17:00 – 18:00 Panel 2: Gender and Bodies

Chair: Rebekah Musk

Kate Singer – Female Sailors & Transatlantic Angst

Jolene Zigarovich – Queer Theory: Questioning the Binary

Alexandra E. LaGrand – ‘The beautiful, the elegant, the lively, Rosalind’: Eulogizing the Extraordinary Miss Walstein

18:00 – 18:15: Discussion on Expanding Queer Romanticisms and Closing Remarks