Dear blog,<\/p>\n
I\u2019m just back from a four-day break in Berlin, which was absolutely brilliant. I went to lots of tiny, contemporary art galleries as well as some of the larger national ones. There is so much going on there and it was very exciting to get a glimpse of a such a vibrant cultural world.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve been asked to do one of the Royal Society\u2019s lunchtime talks in the autumn, which are mostly attended by members of the public rather than academics. The organizer is particularly interested in the material I\u2019ve been writing about Mary Wollstonecraft so I think I will do something on that. I\u2019m on sabbatical next semester, which I\u2019m looking forward to very much, so will have more time to think about how to give a paper that is accessible and interesting to the public.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve also negotiated a book contract with Palgrave Macmillan for the publication of my next monograph, \u2018Creating Romanticism: Case Studies in the Literature, Science and Medicine of the 1790s\u2019, which is brilliant. I enjoyed working with Palgrave Macmillan (and the Commissioning Editor, Paula Kennedy) very much for Shelley and Vitality<\/em> and Teaching Romanticism. <\/em>Now I just have to find the time to finally finish the book.<\/p>\n I\u2019m working in the Portico today, a beautiful library, which has many of the books that I need for the chapter I\u2019m writing on Davy at the moment. I\u2019m currently grappling with his poem \u2018Life\u2019, which seems first to have been written in a notebook (now in the Royal Institution), was commented upon by Coleridge in a letter of 9 October 1800, and changed in consequence. John Davy published it in his Memoirs<\/em> in 1836 under the title \u2018Written after Recovery from a Dangerous Illness\u2019 (referring to Davy\u2019s illness of 1808). Last year, though, I found another version, which Davy published anonymously in a collection edited by Joanna Baillie, called \u2018Life\u2019, in 1823. I\u2019m going to look at these poems for evidence of something Davy called the most \u2018sublime\u2019 idea of all: that matter changes into other states and other forms.<\/p>\n All best,<\/p>\n Sharon<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Dear blog, I\u2019m just back from a four-day break in Berlin, which was absolutely brilliant. I went to lots of tiny, contemporary art galleries as well as some of the larger national ones. There is so much going on there … Continue reading