Dear blog,

We held the north-west long nineteenth century seminar yesterday, with a paper from a LitSciMedder, Rachel Russell, which went extremely well. Rachel had lots of questions and clearly her topic fascinated the audience. The seminars have been going for over a year now; we have one every four months on the first of that month (the next one is January 5th 2011). There are always two academic speakers and two postgraduate papers (usually but not limited to staff /students working in Universities in the north west). We try to have two papers broadly on a topic concerned with the beginning of the nineteenth century and the other two on the later part. Where the ‘long nineteenth century’ starts and finishes though is up for grabs! The seminars have always been well attended, both with academics and members of the public, and we’re financially supported by Manchester Central Library, the University of Salford, BARS (www.bars.ac.uk) and BAVS (www.bavsuk.org). All are welcome!

Tomorrow we have the Northern Modernism Seminar at the University of Salford, and I’m looking forward to that very much. There are some interesting looking papers to be given. I’ve had a cultured week – A Streetcar Named Desire at the Bolton Octogon on Tuesday, John Simm in Hamlet last Saturday, and I went to see Dave Haslam interview Jonathan Franzen on Sunday. I’ve set up a Shelley Reading Group at work because there are now so many Phd students working on Shelley (plus others working more generally in the Romantic period) and two undergraduates writing dissertations on him. I’m really pleased that there’s such interest in Shelley and I’m looking forward to taking a back seat in the reading group and hearing what others think of his poetry.

Finally, I’ve had the date of my inaugural lecture confirmed (Tuesday 22nd February 2011) and will post on this blog the link that is needed to book tickets. I shall be terrified but it’ll be lovely to see lots of friendly faces in the audience.

More soon,

Sharon