British and Romantic Victorian Cultures

Sachs, JonathanLocal tools

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Tel: (514) 848-2424 ext. 2365

Room: LB 674.5

Email: jsachs@alcor.concordia.ca

Courses Fall 2008

ENGL 260.2 lec A

ENGL 325.3 lec. A

Courses Winter 2009

ENGL 325.3 lec. A

ENGL 624B.4 sem. AA



Assistant Professor

My research examines the uses of antiquity in forging literary and political modernity in Britain during the long eighteenth century. My monograph, Romantic Antiquity: Rome in the British Imagination, 1789-1832, in press with Oxford University Press, examines how Romantic-period writers deploy Roman republican precedents to contest central aspects of political modernity including the expansion of political franchise, the rise of mass democratic movements, and the consolidation and spread of empire.. By focusing on how historically-mediated distinctions between “Rome” and “Greece” shift in Romantic-period culture, the book reveals the presence of an internally differentiated classical world in the period’s culture wars.

I am presently at work on a book-length study of cultural decline in the later eighteenth and nineteenth century, tentatively entitled Visions of the End: British Culture and the Concept of Decline, and on essays linking emergent understandings of orality and the importance of place in literary interpretation.

Education

PhD, University of Chicago, Department of English Literature
MA, Cambridge University
BA, Cambridge University, awarded with Honors in English Literature
Research / Teaching Interests

British Romantic period
Relationship between literary and political discourse
Reception of Classical Antiquity


Selected Publications

Monographs:

Romantic Antiquity: Rome in the British Imagination, 1789-1832. Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2009.
Refereed Articles:

“Greece or Rome?: The Uses of Antiquity in Late Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century Britain,” Blackwell’s Literature Compass, forthcoming winter 2009.
“ ‘Yet the Capital of the World’: Rome, Repetition, and History in Shelley’s Later Writings,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 28:2 (June 2006): 105-126.
“From Roman to roman: The Jacobin Novel and the Roman Legacy in the 1790s,” Studies in the Novel 37:3 (Fall 2005): 253-272.
Entries:

“Barthold Georg Niebuhr,” Encyclopedia of the Romantic Era, 1760-1850 (London: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2004), 807-808.
“J.-C.-L. Sismondi,” Encyclopedia of the Romantic Era, 1760-1850 (London: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2004), 1054-55.
Reviews:

Stephanie K. Weiner, Republican Politics and English Poetry, 1789-1874 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), Keats-Shelley Journal LVII (2008), 142-43.
Anjana Sharma, The Autobiography of Desire: English Jacobin Women Novelists of the 1790s (Delhi: Macmillan, 2004), Modern Philology 103:4 (May 2006): 564-568.
Jane Stabler, Byron, Poetics, and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), in Romanticism on the Net, winter 2005.
David Ferris, Silent Urns: Romanticism, Hellenism, Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000) and David Roessel’s In Byron’s Shadow: Modern Greece in the English and American Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), Keats-Shelley Journal LII (2003), 220-223.
John Barrell, Imagining the King’s Death: Figurative Treason, Fantasies of Regicide, 1793-1796 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) and William R. Everdell, The End of Kings: A History of Republics and Republicans, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); in Romanticism 7.2 (2002), 191-96.
Roman Presences: Receptions of Rome in European Culture, 1789-1945, Catherine Edwards, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); in Modern Philology 98:4 (May 2001), 712-16.


Conference Papers / Readings / TalksInvited Lectures

“Romantic Republicanism: Ancient Rome and Literary Modernity,” Cambridge University, Faculty Workshop on Modern Cultural History, May 2008.
“Poet as Critic: Byron’s Literary History” University of Oklahoma, November 2007.
“Hawthorne and American Travel to Rome in the 19th Century,” University of Chicago Humanities Open House, October 2003
.“British Romanticism and the Ruins of Rome,” University of Chicago Humanities Open House, October 2002.


Invited Conference Papers:

“Romantic Republicanism: Ancient Rome and Literary Modernity,” paper to be presented at the “Romans and Romantics” Conference at the Norweigan Cultural Institute, Rome, Italy, April 2009.
“On the Road: Travel, Antiquarianism, Philology,” at Recovering Philology, a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Workshop, Montréal, November 2006.
“Roman Palmyra and Robert Wood,” New Antiquities: Aesthetics, Taste, and Scholarship in the Eighteenth Century Conference, University of Chicago, April 2005.


Other Papers and Presentations:

“Byron, Modernity, and the Decline of Literature,” North American Society for the Study of Romanticism Conference, University of Toronto, Canada, August 2008.
“Antiquity between Visuality and Orality,” American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies Conference, Portland, March 2008.
“Rethinking the Classical Tradition” presented to Classical Thought at Concordia Working Group, Concordia University, Montreal, November 2007
“Byron, Modernity, and the Decline of Literature,” Byron and Modernity Conference, Vancouver, Canada, October 2007.
“Staging Rome: Between Democracy and Empire,” North American Society for the Study of Romanticism and British Association for Romantic Studies Conference, University of Bristol, England, July 2007.
“Writing on the Margins,” Montreal-Ottawa Working Group on Romanticism, Ottawa, April 2007.
“Romantic Catilines: Rome, Democracy, Empire,” North American Society for the Study of Romanticism, Purdue University, Indiana, September 2006.
“Romantic Antiquity: Rome in the British Imagination, 1789-1832,” Montreal-Ottawa Working Group on Romanticism, Montreal, April 2006.
“The Orality of Homer,” American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies Conference, Montréal, March 2006.
“Defying Romantic Norms: Byron, Ancient Rome, and Literary Decline,” North American Society for the Study of Romanticism Conference, Montréal, August 2005.
“The Debatable Land of Antiquity: Shelley’s Rome and the Rethinking of Hellenism in Romantic Britain,” British Association for Romantic Studies, Newcastle, UK, July 2005.
“Picturing Palmyra, Reading Homer: Travel, Strategies of Visual Representation, and the Interpretation of Classical Texts,” American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies Conference, Las Vegas, NV, 29 March 2005.
“Ancient Rome and the British Response to the French Revolution: The Case of Burke and Godwin,” Association of Literary Scholars and Critics Conference, “Romanticism and Revolution” seminar, New Orleans, November 2004.
“Who Cares if Homer was Illiterate?: Robert Wood’s Mediterranean Travels and the Historicist Understanding of Classical Texts,” Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Conference, London, Ontario, October 2004.
“Who Cares if Homer was Illiterate?: Robert Wood’s Mediterranean Travels and the Historicist Understanding of Classical Texts,” Western Society for Eighteenth Century Studies Conference, San Francisco, February 2004.
“Shelley’s Rome: Rethinking Hellenism and the Classical Tradition in Romantic Britain,” Re-Imagining the Ancient World in 19th-Century Britain Conference the University of Michigan, January 2003.
“Romanticism and the Discourse of Rome,” International Conference on Romanticism, Milwaukee, November 2003.
“Engraving Antiquity: Imagination and the Classical Landscape in the Work of Robert Wood,” Classical Pilgrimages, Consecrated Landscapes, Paul Mellon Centre for British Art, London, April 2003.
“From Robert Wood to Lord Byron: Eighteenth-Century Mediterranean Exploration and Romantic Rhetoric,” University of Chicago Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Cultures Workshop, December 2002.
“Roman History and the Romantic Novel,” University of Chicago British Romantic and Victorian Culture Workshop, University of Chicago, November 2000.


Grants / Research Awards

Fonds québécois de la recherché sur la société et la culture, Nouveaux professeurs-chercheurs grant, 2006-2009
Folger Shakespeare Library Short-Term Fellowship, 2006-2007
Special Collections Research Fellowship, University of Chicago Library, 2006-2007
Carl H. Pforzheimer, Jr. Research Grant, Keats-Shelley Association of America, 2006
Huntington Library, Connell Fellowship, 2006-2007
Paul Mellon Centre for British Art, London, Research Support Grant, spring 2005
Concordia University Internal Social Sciences and Humanities Research Grant, 2005-2006