Speaker
Fiona Stafford is Professor of English at the University of Oxford and Academic Lead of the Environmental Humanities Programme at TORCH. She works on Romantic Literature, Place and Nature Writing and Literature and the Visual Arts. Her latest book is Time and Tide, and other recent work includes The Brief Life of Flowers, The Long, Long Life of Trees and Reading Romantic Poetry. She is a regular contributor to BBC Radio.
Speaker
Stefano Evangelista is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Oxford University and Fellow of Trinity College. He specialises in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, particularly decadence, translation, and the relations between literature and visual culture. He currently holds an Einstein Visiting Fellowship at the Humboldt University, Berlin, where he is in charge of a project on literary cosmopolitanism at the turn of the twentieth century. Stefano is also part of the research project ‘Chromotope’, which studies the cultural history of colour in the 19th Century, and which is behind the ‘Colour Revolution’ exhibition, currently on show at the Ashmolean Museum.
Speaker
Amelia Yeates is Associate Professor in Art History at Liverpool Hope University, specialising in nineteenth-century art. She has published on Pygmalion in nineteenth-century art and poetry, women’s reading practices and artistic masculinities in the nineteenth century. She was co-editor of Pre-Raphaelite Masculinities (2014, Ashgate), editor of a special issue of Visual Culture in Britain (July 2015) on The Male Artist in Nineteenth-Century Britain and co-editor of Picturing the Reader: Reading and Representation in the Long Nineteenth-Century (Peter Lang, 2022).
Chair
Dr Ben Grant is a Lecturer in English Literature in the Department for Continuing Education, University of Oxford. He has a research background in postcolonial studies and cultural translation. His first book, Postcolonialism, Psychoanalysis and Burton: Power Play of Empire (2009), was about the iconic Victorian explorer and translator, Richard Francis Burton, who began his career as a spy in British India. Ben is also interested in all forms of brevity in literature, and his second book, The Aphorism and Other Short Forms (2016), aims to give a consolidated picture of the exciting and often marginalised genres of the aphorism and related short forms, such as the proverb and the fragment. Ben is currently working on life writing and autobiographical fiction, particularly in the work of Jenny Diski.
