17 January 2014 13:39

The Department of English and Creative Writing celebrates its two new Professors of Romanticism, Sally Bushell and Sharon Ruston, with a special Romanticism Research Seminar to be held on 22 January at 5pm.

Professor Bushell will be speaking on Wordsworth and Professor Sharon Ruston on Humphry Davy and Thomas De Quincey.

Professor Ruston is Chair in Romanticism, having joined Lancaster in 2013 from the University of Salford where she was Chair in Nineteenth Century Literature and Culture.

Her main research interests are in the relations between the literature, science and medicine of the Romantic period.

Her first book, “Shelley and Vitality” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), explored the medical and scientific contexts that inform Shelley's concept of vitality in his major poetry.  

She has also given public lectures at the Royal Society and the Royal Institution of Great Britain and published in the Lancet.

Her most recent book is called “Creating Romanticism: Case Studies in the Literature, Science, and Medicine of the 1790s” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).  

She is currently co-editing the “Collected Letters of Sir Humphry Davy and his Circle”.

Sally Bushell is Professor of Romantic and Victorian Literature and Co-Director of The Wordsworth Centre at Lancaster University.  She came to Lancaster from Cambridge in 2000.

Her primary research specialism is in the field of British Romanticism with a particular interest in Wordsworth and the Lake District but she is also interested in the study of textual process and the draft materials which precede the published work.  

Her current research is on literary cartography and the mapping and reading of literary works in the Victorian period and early twentieth century.  

Her publications include: “Re-Reading The Excursion” (Ashgate, 2002); “The Excursion” (co-edited,Cornell University Press, 2007); and “Text as Process: Creative Composition in Wordsworth, Tennyson and Dickinson” (University Press of Virginia, 2009).

The event on January 22 is at Lancaster University Management School Lecture Theatre 3. All welcome.