Programme

18th June 2016 at TORCH | The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities

9.30        Registration opens

10.15     Welcome and Introduction: Dr Catherine Redford and Emily Knight, University of Oxford

10.30     Panel A: The Eighteenth-Century Apocalyptic Imagination: The Interpretative Landscape (Chair: Amelia Greene)

• Dr Jonathan Downing, University of Bristol: ‘The Commentators’ Apocalypse: The Interpretation of Biblical Eschatology in Eighteenth-Century Popular Commentaries’
• Professor Stephen Bygrave, University of Southampton: ‘Improvement and Apocalypse: Joseph Priestley’s Rhetoric in the 1790s’

Panel B: The Last Man (Chair: Eva-Charlotta Mebius)

• Dr Claire Sheridan, University of Greenwich: ‘Apocalypse as Domestic Melodrama: Dibdin Pitt’s The Last Man; or, the Miser of Eltham Green’
• Audrey Borowski, University of Oxford: ‘The Strange Indetermination of Cousin de Grainville’s “Last Man”’
• Dr Adrian Tait, Independent Scholar: ‘Intimations of Apocalypse: From Mary Shelley’s The Last Man to M. P. Shiel’s The Purple Cloud’

12.00     Sandwich lunch (provided)

12.45     Panel A: Revelation/Revelations (Chair: Christian Zolles)

• Dr Natasha O’Hear, University of St Andrews: ‘Four Become One: The Preoccupation with the Fourth Horseman of the Apocalypse in the Eighteenth Century’
• Joanna Raisbeck, University of Oxford: ‘The Post-Kantian Apocalypse: Revelatory Visions in Jean Paul and Karoline von Günderrode’
• Randall Reinhard, University of Edinburgh: ‘The Revelation of Edward Irving: The Apocalypse as Social Criticism’

Panel B: Secular Apocalypse: Nature and the Human (Chair: Elsa Hammond)

• Amelia Greene, City University of New York: ‘Uncovered Earth: Scaled Apocalypse in John Clare’
• Lucia Scigliano, Durham University: ‘“What faith is crushed, what empires bleed”: Apocalypse and Nature in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Hellas’
• Adam D. J. Laity, University of the West of England: ‘The Last Man, the Rückenfigur and Mad Max: Romantic Subjectivism and “the human” within the Apocalyptic Sublime Landscape’

2.15        Tea & Coffee (provided)

2.45       Panel A: Ruin and Catastrophe (Chair: Audrey Borowski)

• Dr Jessica Stacey, King’s College London: ‘Apocalypse of Meaning: Catastrophes of Language in Eighteenth-Century France’
• Thomas Moynihan, University of Oxford: ‘Human Extinction and Romanticism: The Intellectual Discovery of the End of Thought’
• Dr Helen Slaney, University of Oxford: ‘Original Ruins’

Panel B: Apocalyptic Afterlives (Chair: Stephen Bygrave)

• Dr Christian Zolles, University of Vienna: ‘Modern Apocalypse in Reverse: Edgar Allan Poe’s Dialogue The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion (1839)’
• Tom Bromwell, University of York: ‘A Sublime Armageddon: First World War Artists and the Burkean Sublime’
• Dr Catherine Redford, University of Oxford: ‘From Mary Shelley to H. G. Wells: The Romantic Last Man Reimagined’

4.15        Plenary lecture

Professor Fiona Stafford, University of Oxford: ‘Barkless, Branchless, Blighted: Alpine Apocalypse in 1816’

5.15        Closing remarks; walk to Oxford Castle

6.15        Showcase in St. George’s Crypt, Oxford Castle: A selection of musical and literary imaginings of the Last Man on earth from the Romantic period (running time: 30 mins)

7.00        Dinner*

 

*Sign-up required. See here for further details.