Programme

Thursday, 25 September 2025

From 1:00 pm Registration
2:15 pm – 3:00 pmWelcome Addresses and Introduction

Ralf Haekel (University of Leipzig, Germany), President of the German Society for English Romanticism
Gerold Sedlmayr (FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany): “Negotiations of Value in the Romantic Age: An Outline”
3:00 pm – 4:30 pmPANEL 1
Literary Value: The Economy of Letters, Canon Formation, and the Question of Disinterestedness

Chair: Michael Meyer (University of Koblenz, Germany)

Sebastian Domsch (University of Greifswald, Germany): “The Economy of Letters – Concepts of Literary Value in Romanticism” 
Martina Jauch (University of Applied Sciences, Trier, Germany): “The Consumption of Values – Judgment, Authority and Aesthetics in the Formation of the Romantic Literary Canon”
Natalie Roxburgh (University of Hamburg, Germany): “Disinterestedness as Discourse and the Problem of Literary Value”
4:30 pm – 5:00 pm Coffee Break
5:00 pm – 6:45 pmKeynote 1: Michelle Faubert (University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada): “Human Rights, Human Value in the Age of Transatlantic Slavery: Assessing the Subject in British Romanticism”

Chair: Mona Kammer (FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany)
7:30 pmConference Warming at Restaurant “Alter Simpl”, Bohlenplatz 2, 91054 Erlangen

Friday, 26 September 2025

9:00 am – 10:30 amPANEL 2
Reassessments of Aesthetic Value and the Value of Knowledge
 
Chair: Christoph Bode (LMU Munich, Germany)

Tilottama Rajan (University of Western Ontario, Canada): “Rethinking Aesthetic Value Through Hegel and Schelling: Between Aesthetics and Naturphilosophie”
Jorunn Joiner (Lund University, Sweden): “Valuable Paper and Priceless Information: The Society of Antiquaries of London and Anglo-Nordic Exchanges”
Prachi Sharma (Independent scholar, Gurgaon, India): “Myth, Nature, and the Sacred: Reimagining Cultural Value in German and Indian Romanticism”
10:30 am – 11:00 am Coffee Break
11:00 am – 12:00 pmPANEL 3
Reclaiming Value: Women Writers’ Subversion of Normative Literary, Economic and Moral Values
 
Chair: Simone Broders (FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany)

Mari Komnæs (Lund University, Sweden): “Reclaiming Value after the Fall: Mary Hays’s Renegotiation of Sexual and Economic Value in The Victim of Prejudice“
Irene Valenti (University of Augsburg, Germany): “Counter-Daemonic: Subversion of Values in L.E.L.’s Literary Annual Fairies”
 
12:00 pm – 2:00 pm Lunch Break
2:00 pm – 3:00 pm PANEL 4
The Value of Time / The Timing of Value: Aesthetic Value, Time, and Media

Chair: Frank Erik Pointner (University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany)
 
Marvin Reimann (University of Bonn, Germany): “Reconceiving the Value of Time: Its Commodification and Recovery as Individual Time in the Romantic Period”
Roger Todd Whitson (Washington State University, USA): “Computational Dialectics of Art and Economics: Ada Lovelace, Charles Babbage, and the History of the Media Concept”
3:00 pm – 3:30 pmCoffee Break
3:30 pm – 4:30 pm PANEL 5
The Literary and Political Value of Genre (1)

Chair: Cian Duffy (Lund University, Sweden)
 
Ian Duncan (University of California, Berkeley, USA): “Settler Pastoral: Scotland in South Africa”
Robert W. Jones (University of Leeds, UK): “Sheridan the Tax Man”
4:30 pm – 5:45 pmKeynote 2: David Duff (Queen Mary University, London, UK): “Negative Aesthetics: Coleridge’s Philosophical History of Bad Poetry”

Chair: Gerold Sedlmayr (FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany)
7:00 pmConference Dinner at Restaurant Thalermühle, Thalermühle 1, 91054 Erlangen

Saturday, 27 September 2025

9:30 am – 10:30 amPANEL 6
The Literary and Political Value of Genre (2)

Chair: Marleen Waffler (FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany)

Kathrin Bethke (FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany): “Measures of Value: Charlotte Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets and the Axiology of Poetic Genre”
Wolfgang Funk (Johannes-Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, Germany): “The Lie of the Village: Economies of the Pastoral in and before the Romantic Era”
10:30 am – 11:00 am Coffee Break
11:00 am – 12:00 pmPANEL 7
The Value of (Historical) Truth in Fiction, Textual Criticism and Religion

Chair: Katrin Röder (TU Dortmund University, Germany)
 
Angela Esterhammer (University of Toronto, Canada): “Credibility and Truth-Value in the Late-Romantic Historical Novel: Scott and Galt”
Dafydd Moore (University of Plymouth, UK): “‘Vindicating’ Homer: Negotiating Religious, Literary and Historical Value in the Search for the Trojan War”
12:00 pm – 2:00 pm Lunch Break
2:00 pm – 3:00 pm PANEL 8
Productive vs. Unproductive Values? Satire, Comedy and the Economic

Chair: Gerd Bayer (FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany)
 
Robert Clark (University of East Anglia, UK): “Money, Markets and Values in Northanger Abbey and Persuasion“
Chi-Fang Chen (National Chiayi University, Taiwan): “The Political Economy of Comedy: On Disinterested Value in Romantic Criticism”
3:00 pm – 3:30 pm Coffee Break
3:30 pm – 4:30 pmPANEL 9
The (Economic) Value of Nature and the Environment / The Formative Impact of the Economic on Human and Non-Human Nature

Chair: Laura Zick (FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany)
  
Carolin Böttcher (Trier University, Germany): “The Value of Botany in The Wild Irish Girl” 
Isabel Fernandez Mayor (University of Augsburg, Germany): “The Affectivity of the Natural World and the Romantic Child: Christian-Romantic Values in Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s Hymns in Prose for Children“
4:45 pm – 6:00 pmKeynote 3: Joanna Rostek (Justus-Liebig-University, Gießen, Germany): “The Value of Economic Criticism for Romantic Studies”

Chair: Kathrin Bethke (FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany)
Dinner, self-organised
9:00 pm Guided City Tour through Erlangen with the ‘nightwatchman’ (Meeting point: Hugenottenplatz, Kugelbrunnen)

Sunday 28 September 2025

09:30 am – 11:00 amPANEL 10
Media Materialism, Aesthetic Reevaluations of Environmental Worlds, and the Material-Discursive Dimensions of Romantic Language

Chair: Ralf Haekel (University of Leipzig, Germany)
 
Andrew Burkett (Union College, New York, USA): “The Value of Mediation and Time in the Environmental Art of John Constable” 
Alexander Scherr (Justus-Liebig-University, Gießen, Germany): “Listening to the Breeze: The Value of Romantic Poetry in the Anthropocene”
Martin Fog Arndal (University of Copenhagen, Denmark): “The Economic is Ecological: Mary Wollstonecraft on Nature, the Body, and Capital”
11:00 pm – 11:30 pm Coffee Break
11:30 am – 12:30 pmPANEL 11
Authorial Value / The Value of the Author

Chair: Ute Berns (University of Hamburg, Germany)
 
Deven Parker (University of Glasgow, UK): “The Value of the Romantic Playwright”
Andrin Albrecht (University of Jena, Germany): “Ishmael, Oil Baron”
12:30 pm – 2:00 pmLunch Break
2:00 pm – 3:00 pmGER General Meeting