Teaching Italian Romanticism through Philately and Choral Works

Philately and choral works can be excellent integrative pedagogical tools when teaching Italian Romanticism at undergraduate level. In the classroom, postage stamps provide an historical narrative for students and can help clarify the political, artistic, and cultural mood of the time. The intrinsic symbolism of stamps represents the way a nation wants to be seen by the rest of the world. Instrumental and choral music, in their infinite combination of tones, blend sound with sung words, creating an artistic subtext that reveals the complexity and variety of human aesthetic expression. For the current generation of students accustomed to visual and auditory learning tools, classroom realia and a multidisciplinary approach to Italian Romantic literature enhance peer discussions, and encourage students to explore and value the development of human thought in all of its non-linear manifestations.

Book History without Old Books1

During the pandemic, the closure of university libraries and Special Collections meant that there were few opportunities for students to interact with the print and manuscript material of the Romantic period. These conditions created an entirely new set of interactions between instructors and students, students and their classmates, and students and their objects of study. To address these new conditions, we created a series of assignments that sought to recreate a sense of the opportunities and pleasures of the sensory experience in an archive; to foster an understanding of both the material history of Romantic literary culture and of material culture more broadly; and finally to connect students emotionally with the objects of their study. This essay reports on the outcomes of these assignments and what they can teach us about attempts to integrate play, discovery, and interactivity with material objects into the study of Romantic writing.

Teaching With the Archive When the Archive Shuts Down

In this essay, I discuss the design of “Anatomy and the Archive,” a 300-level writing-intensive medical humanities class for students in the health sciences and liberal arts, and how I adapted when the 2020 COVID pandemic disrupted our plans to mount a gallery exhibition of archival anatomical textbooks as its final project. Students read about medical museums, the history of art and anatomy, book history, and ethical issues surrounding working with human remains, and they visited our campus’s cadaver lab. Experts in these fields guest lectured via Zoom and assisted students remotely to assemble the exhibition. When we were unable to visit a local archive or the gallery space, we brought some of the archive to the classroom and watched video tours of the gallery. Students successfully designed an exhibition “Between Beauty and Knowledge: Women’s Bodies in Anatomical Atlases,” which will open once COVID restrictions have lifted.

Reenacting the Pamphlet War in an Age of Turmoil

Published in 1790, Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France triggered a pamphlet war whose major players included Mary Wollstonecraft, Thomas Paine, and the artist James Gillray. The debate that ensued about the French Revolution, which Percy Shelley called “the master theme of the epoch in which we live,” was fundamentally a debate between past and present, between tradition and the needs of a living culture, and between the status quo and innovation. This essay describes an attempt by the author to reenact the Pamphlet War at the US Air Force Academy to help cadets negotiate these tensions at their institution and, in doing so, participate in the work of Romanticism. The essay also suggests ways Romanticists could harness the Pamphlet War to engage political and cultural debates in our own age of upheaval and turmoil. Finally, it offers the Pamphlet War as a vehicle for debating the state of the field and the work of the Romantic classroom itself.

“The Contagion of Her Wretchedness”: Rousing Interest in the Highland Widows of Scott and McQueen

Walter Scott’s “The Highland Widow” proved to be a challenging text to teach online during the pandemic; put off by antiquated language, embedded narratives, and the temporal distance of the widow and her history, my students had little to offer in our discussion. In order to rouse their interest and restore “classroom affect,” I incorporated streaming video of two Alexander McQueen fashion shows with thematic resonance—Highland Rape (1995) and Widows of Culloden (2006). Like Scott, McQueen compels his audience to confront the violence and forced assimilation of Scotland’s past, but in a visually provocative and immediate fashion that captures the attention of easily distracted, languishing students. Together, the two artists offer a recursive model for engaging students in remote and difficult texts, encouraging instructors to prolong the intensity of the affective encounter and defer the moment of instructional resolution.

Perambulating Mice and the Confluence of Sympathy and Moral Education

The late eighteenth century was the locus of a burgeoning interest in animal rights. This essay examines the critical role that children’s literature had in the evolution of more consideration for animal welfare. The use of animals in the works of writers such as Sarah Trimmer, Mary Wollstonecraft, Anna Letitia Barbauld, and Dorothy Kilner helped create a form of animal subjectivity as a means of teaching children compassion through the creation of sympathy for nonhuman animals. By fostering compassion for the needs of so-called “dumb creatures” children could also be taught, by extension, to have more consideration for other people. In particular, Dorothy Kilner’s animal autobiography The Life and Perambulations of a Mouse offers a new way of viewing animals who are neither physical nor affectional slaves as worthy of both consideration and compassion.