“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Saturday, April 14, 2012

Celeste Langan at UC Davis on Monday

Celeste Langan is an Associate Professor in the English Department at UC Berkeley and Acting Director of the Townsend Center for the Humanities there.

She is chiefly a Romanticist, and even when she writes on and teaches materials relating to her two subspecialties, media theory and disability studies, she tends to begin by focusing on Romantic things.

In addition to having written a book on Wordsworth, Romantic Vagrancy, she has written several essays on media, including “Understanding Media in 1805,” “Pathologies of Communication from Coleridge to Schreber,” “Scotch Drink and Irish Harps: Mediations of the National Air,” “Medium Cool Romanticism,” and, with Maureen McLane, “The Medium of Romantic Poetry.”

Her presentation today, “Ambiguity and Neutrality Circa 1800,” is part of a larger work-in-progress called Post-Napoleonism: Imagining Sovereignty after 1799 (which she hopes to complete during next year’s sabbatical!).

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