Keynote speakers
Prof. Clare Pettitt
Professor of Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture at King’s College London
I grew up in Manchester and studied English at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. After six years in London working in journalism and theatre, I did a D.Phil. at Linacre College, Oxford, transferring to Pembroke College when I was awarded the Robert Browning Research Studentship. My first academic job was at Leeds University, and in 1998 I returned to Cambridge as a College Teaching Officer and Director of Studies in English at Newnham College, where I worked for seven years. During this time, I became a Research Director on the Leverhulme Research Programme Grant, ‘Past- vs.-Present: Abandoning the Past in an Age of Progress’: a Cambridge-based interdisciplinary project with Classics, History and History and Philosophy of Science.
I moved to a lectureship at King’s College London in 2005, where I was promoted to Professor in 2008. While at KCL, I ran a four-year collaborative and interdisciplinary AHRC research project with KCL, University College London, and the Courtauld Institute of Art called ‘Scrambled Messages: The Telegraphic Imaginary 1857-1900.’ Between 2016 and 2018, I was seconded for two years to be Director of the London Arts and Humanities Partnership (LAHP), the Doctoral Consortium for London universities, where I was responsible for writing a successful bid for an expanded LAHP2 consortium.
I have been a Visiting Scholar at The Heyman Center, Columbia University, New York; at the Visual Studies Research Institute at the University of Southern California; and at the University of Uppsala. In 2022, I was a Mercator Fellow at Humboldt University, Berlin and the Robert Lehman Visiting Professor at Villa I Tatti, The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, Florence.
I am the UK General Editor of the Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture monograph series at Cambridge University Press, and an editor of the journal, Cambridge Quarterly. I review regularly for the Times Literary Supplement.
In January 2023 I returned to Cambridge as Grace 2 Professor. I am a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge.
Prof. Diego Saglia
Full Professor of English Literature (SSD L-LIN/10) at the Department of Humanities, Social Sciences and Cultural Enterprises, University of Parma
I teach English Literature at the University of Parma, where I’ve been working since 1998, and I’ve been the Director of the Department of Humanities, Social Sciences and Cultural Industries since January 2017. I took my PhD at the University of Cardiff (UK) and, before joining Parma, I taught at the University of Cardiff and the University of Bath (UK).
My research focuses on Romantic-period literature and culture, particularly on such themes as exoticism and orientalism, Gothic, national and gender identity, drama and theatre, as well as several central figures including Jane Austen, Lord Byron, Robert Southey, Felicia Hemans and Walter Scott. I am also interested in international and transcultural relations between Great Britain and other European traditions between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and especially Anglo-Hispanic relations and constructions of the image of Spain in British Romanticism (Poetic Castles in Spain: British Romanticism and Figurations of Iberia, 2000). My essays have appeared in Studies in Romanticism, La questione romantica, The Keats-Shelley Journal, Romanticism, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, Textus, ELH, Textual Practice, Studies in the Novel, Gothic Studies, Genre, SEL and other international journals. My volume Byron e il segno plurale: tracce del sé, percorsi di scrittura (2011) was awarded the Elma Dangerfield prize of the International Byron Society in 2012, and the volume Byron and Italy (co-edited with Alan Rawes, University of Manchester, 2017) received it in 2018. In my most recent monograph, European Literatures and British Romanticism, 1815-1832: Romantic Translations, published by Cambridge University Press in 2018, I develop further my interest in transnational and international issues in Romantic-era British literature and culture.
I am also a member of the advisory committee of the “Byron Museum at Palazzo Guiccioli” (Ravenna), and of the editorial boards of Victoriographies and the series “Romanticismo e dintorni” (Liguori); coordinator of the Parma unit of the Interuniversity Centre for the Study of Romanticism (CISR); and a member of the steering committees of “Anglo-Hispanic Horizons, 1780-1840” (AHH) and “Project Reve” associated with ERA (“European Romanticisms in Association”).