This post relates to the background to Issue 25 (2024) of Romantic Textualities, which has just been published (belatedly) and was guest edited by Andrew McInnes, our Digital Editor and author of this blog post.

Looking back on ‘Romanticism Goes to University’, a two-day symposium I hosted in 2018, feels like looking back at a different world. The event was the third and final in a series punning on the name of my home institution, following ‘Edgy Romanticism’ and ‘Romanticism Takes to the Hills’, all of which were designed to demonstrate capacity to host the British Association of Romantic Studies biannual conference – which finally took place, in collaboration with the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism, in 2022. Whereas ‘New Romanticisms’ in August 2022 was a hybrid event, with a fully digital day, and online and in person options for the rest of the conference, at which mask wearing was encouraged, ‘Romanticism Goes to University’ was a much smaller, more intimate, and more coherent set of conversations – the pandemic, and the necessary adaptations it has enforced, almost unimaginable at the time.

I divided the two-day event into ‘Higher Education in the Romantic Period’ on day 1 and ‘Romantic Studies Today’ on day 2. Unfortunately, Anthony Mandal was ill and unable to give his keynote on ‘Editing the Romantics’ but the first panel acted as an introduction to the day, with Matthew Sangster and Catherine Ross exploring Romantic writers’ experience at university. Matt’s article expands into a discussion of the many ways in which university experience informed poetic practice in the period.

After lunch, we explored connections between British universities and continental experiences in Germany, Lithuania, and Spain. Michael Bradshaw’s article explores Beddoes’ experience in Britain and Germany, thinking about how radical student politics informed his Gothic writing.

The next panel moved the focus beyond universities to think about education more broadly in and around the Godwin-Wollstonecraft circle. John-Erik Hanssen’s article explores Godwin’s children’s writing, making use of Sianne Ngai’s aesthetic category of the ‘interesting’ to think about how Godwin encourages further thought beyond his fables. Colette Davies provocatively evaluates Wollstonecraft’s gatekeeping in public and private, analysing Wollstonecraft’s educational persona in offering advice.

After an afternoon tea of macarons and other treats, Katie Garner finished the day in fine style, introducing the various readers of Glasgow’s university libraries.

The next day opened with Judith Pascoe’s keynote workshop, which invited us to develop our own syllabi inspired by Wollstonecraft’s writing. Her article in this special issue of Romantic Textualities considers the potential of grief to inform our reading of Godwin’s biography of Wollstonecraft, his editorial work on her posthumous works, and digital humanities projects today.

The next panel continued this conversation about the work of mourning in education. Emily Dolive’s article thinks about how grief and mourning offer women poets ways to engage readers in new ways to imagine possible futures.

The final panel of the conference showcased digital and public humanities approaches to engaging students and the wider world with Romantic Studies.

Finishing the conference, Alice Jenkins outlined the trajectory of university education beyond the Romantic period through the Victorians to today. The workshop discussion mused on challenges to Higher Education in 2018, including critical underfunding, government and media hostility to the arts and humanities, and ways out of what already felt then like a crisis.

Last year, this crisis has only worsened, if anything, made worse by the impact of the global pandemic and a government ever more antagonistic toward universities in general and the arts and humanities in particular. In lieu of a conclusion, here is a list of universities at which staff have recently been or remain at risk of redundancy, based on information compiled by Queen Mary UCU and available in more detail at https://qmucu.org/qmul-transformation/uk-he-shrinking/#current-redundancy-programmes:

1. Aberdeen
2. Aberystwyth
3. Anglia Ruskin
4. Aston
5. Bangor
6. Bedfordshire
7. Birkbeck
8. Birmingham
9. Birmingham City
10. Bolton
11. The Arts University Bournemouth
12. Bournemouth
13. Bradford
14. Brighton
15. Bristol
16. Brunel
17. Cambridge
18. Canterbury Christ Church
19. Cardiff
20. Cardiff Metropolitan University
21. Chichester
22. Chester
23. Coventry
24. Cranfield
25. University for the Creative Arts
26. Cumbria
27. De Montfort
28. Derby
29. Dundee
30. Durham
31. East Anglia
32. Edge Hill
33. Edinburgh
34. Edinburgh Napier
35. Essex
36. Exeter
37. Falmouth
38. Glasgow
39. Glasgow Caledonian
40. Goldsmiths
41. Gloucestershire
42. Goldsmiths
43. Greenwich
44. Heriot-Watt
45. Hertfordshire
46. Highlands and Islands
47. Huddersfield
48. Hull
49. Keele
50. Kent
51. Kingston
52. Central Lancashire
53. Lancaster
54. Leeds
55. Leeds Beckett
56. Leeds Trinity
57. Leicester
58. Lincoln
59. Liverpool
60. Liverpool Hope
61. London Met
62. Loughborough
63. LSE
64. St Mary’s Twickenham
65. Middlesex
66. Newcastle
67. Northampton
68. Northumbria
69. Nottingham
70. Open University
71. Oxford Brookes
72. Arts University Plymouth
73. Plymouth
74. University of St Mark & St John in Plymouth (Plymouth Marjon)
75. Portsmouth
76. QMUL
77. Queen Margaret
78. Queen’s University Belfast
79. Reading
80. Robert Gordon University
81. Roehampton
82. Royal Central School of Speech and Drama
83. Royal College of Art
84. Royal Holloway
85. Sheffield
86. Sheffield Hallam
87. SOAS
88. South Bank
89. South Wales
90. Southampton
91. Staffordshire
92. Stirling
93. Strathclyde
94. Suffolk
95. Sunderland
96. Surrey
97. Sussex
98. Swansea
99. Teesside
100. Trinity St David (Wales)
101. UCL
102. Ulster
103. Warwick
104. West of England
105. West of Scotland
106. Winchester
107. Wolverhampton
108. Worcester
109. York
110. York St John

Additionally, we were shocked to read earlier this month (May 2026) the devastating news of the complete removal of the humanities from the University of Hertfordshire, an institution that had been the academic lead on a number of exciting and innovative digital humanities projects such as Old Bailey Online (1674–1913) database and Locating London’s Past.

In solidarity!