The Humanities Research Institute is pleased to support an afternoon of events on 3 March, 2017 organized by the Department of English in honour of the publication by the University of Toronto Press of Dr. Chris Bundock’s book, Romantic Prophecy and the Resistance to Historicism.  In conjunction with the book launch, Dr. Bundock will also give a lecture and present a proseminar on surmounting the challenges to young scholars of publishing in the Humanities.

Biography of Dr. Chris Bundock

Chris Bundock (PhD Western) is assistant professor of English at the University of Regina. His book, Romantic Prophecy and the Resistance to Historicism, was published by the University of Toronto Press in 2016. He has also published articles on a range of topics centred in British Romanticism, including epistolary fiction, the Gothic, and Romantic historiography. Building on questions of prophetic embodiment and the “sense” of history touched on in this past work, his recent project, Romanticism’s Foreign Bodies, focuses on how bodies in Romanticism react to foreign objects that these same bodies incorporate—that is, how the body becomes other to itself in peculiar and acute ways in Romanticism. This is especially urgent in the Romantic period since, in the immediately-preceding Enlightenment, the body became the basis for empirical science. He is also co-editor of William Blake’s Gothic Imagination: Bodies of Horror forthcoming with Manchester University Press.

Professional-Development Seminar: “the Making of Romantic Prophecy, or, The Junior Professor’s Guide to Academic Publishing in the Humanities.”

This presentation will focus on the practical side of book publication in the humanities for junior scholars. This means touching on how to compose a book proposal, how to approach revision, and ways to address reader and publisher reports. It will also discuss timelines, copyright, image permissions, and indexing. There will be ample time for Q&A.

Lecture: “The History of Prophecy in Percy Shelley’s Hellas.”

This lecture will consist of a reading from chapter five of Romantic Prophecy and the Resistance to Historicism. This excerpt discusses how Percy Shelley’s historical drama, Hellas, performs a novel, Romantic form of historiography that displaces its own narrative structure in an effort to attend to the turbulent and unpredictable events of the Greek Rebellion of 1821. To this end, Shelley employs figures of rhetorical synthesis in deliberately self-cancelling or self-frustrating ways and represents prophecy not as a means to prediction but as a mechanism through which we see the futility of attempts to narrate history into rational coherence.

For those interested, the following texts may be useful to read beforehand:

Ulmer, William. “Hellas and the Historical Uncanny.” ELH 58.3 (1991): 611–32.

Koselleck, Reinhart, “‘Space of Experience’ and ‘Horizon of Expectation’: Two Historical Categories.” Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time. Trans. Keith Tribe. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985. 255-76.

Schedule of Events for March 3, 2017

Proseminar: “The Making of Romantic Prophecy, or, The Junior Professor’s Guide to Academic Publishing in the Humanities”

AH 347, 2:30 – 3:30 pm

Lecture: “The History of Prophecy in Percy Shelley’s Hellas”

AH 348, 3:30 – 4:30 pm

Book Launch Reception: AH 349, 4:30 – 6:00 pm.