My project explores the cultural history of environmental change amid the Industrial Revolution in Britain, from the 1790s to the 1830s. I study poets, politicians and philosophers of the Romantic period who were also first-hand participants in experimental schemes to change the physical landscape around them. The writers who feature in this project drained marshlands, managed estates, designed industrial villages, or - on a smaller but still significant scale - gardened, farmed or planned utopian communities. Their social and artistic ideals influenced their land reform enterprises. In turn, the successes and failures of those enterprises changed their ideas about society and art. Studying these writers reveals the interactions between nature, politics and imagination during a period that shaped the global environment of the present day. Romantic literature has always been special to environmentalists. It has often been seen as a profound source of ecological values, thanks to figures like Wordsworth ('Come forth into the light of things / Let Nature be your teacher'), Coleridge's albatross-shooting ancient mariner, and Mary Shelley's reckless Victor Frankenstein. Many scholars have traced the origins of green politics to Romantic idealisations of harmonious dwelling amid the natural world. Their research has been important, but it also has its limitations. The coupling of Romanticism and modern environmentalism can make it seem as if all that really matters is the sensitivity with which solitary individuals appreciate nature. In that perspective, important things are lost. This project is different because it stresses the fact that the nonhuman world is always changing. 'Nature' is less a static source of spiritual values than a dynamic product of historical circumstances. Hence my concern with experiments in new kinds of land use. The authors I study were shaped by personal experience of the ground they worked on: its obduracy, its ecological complexity and its potential for new life. I am especially interested in writers who were radical or oppositional in their politics. Through them, I will examine how social status and power relations mediate experiences of the nonhuman world. My project sheds new light on several canonical Romantic poets: Wordsworth, Coleridge and Percy Shelley. It sets them alongside other writers who are far less well remembered, like William Madocks, the radical MP who undertook a vast scheme to embank an estuary from the sea, and Charles Waterton, the naturalist who turned his ancestral estate into what has been called the world's first nature reserve. I will track those reformers through five pivotal decades for Britain's economy and environment. The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries are the 'classic' era of the British Industrial Revolution. Historians have increasingly recognised that the Industrial Revolution involved the reshaping and rethinking of ecosystems. In Britain and its overseas colonies, industrialisation required both radically transformed landscapes and new conceptions of nature itself. For that reason, the main strand of this project will be complemented by a collection of essays, written by economic historians and literary scholars, exploring wider issues of environmental change in the Romantic decades. That essay collection will break new ground in showing what economic and environmental history can add to the study of literature. This project's ultimate aim is to map a new path for environmental studies of British history and culture. Romantic writings about experiments in land and society let us address fundamental questions about the causes and cultures of ecological change. Britain's imperial and industrial transformation shaped the global environmental crisis of the present day. The Romantics' land experiments can help us understand the history of upheavals that now affect everyone, everywhere.

This project aims to shift Romantic Studies from the sublime to the ridiculous. In asking 'Is Romanticism ridiculous?' I do not seek to dismiss either the period or its literature as meaningless or unimportant, but to ask instead whether an alternative approach to its aesthetics categories can shift the specialism from a still dominant focus on a narrow canon of individuals to a joyful celebration of collectivity and collaboration. Building on the work of German philosopher Jean Paul Richter, I define the ridiculous as a comic juxtaposition of perspectives, based on an initial failure of understanding. Richter argues that our sense of the ridiculous originates in early interactions with nature, triggering a kind of counter-sublime which reorients the relationship between individuals, imagination, and landscape, focusing on communal responses to the natural world above individual takes. For Richter, the ridiculous is most clearly seen in social interactions, provoking laughter, community, and collaboration between groups of people. This project adopts the ridiculous as a lens through which to read Romantic-period engagements with the natural and social worlds, shifting the emphasis away from encounters between an individual genius and sublime scene to an aesthetic perspective which privileges joyful group dynamics promising moral and spiritual rejuvenation, especially in relation to children and childhood. Throughout the project, Samuel Taylor Coleridge recurs as a philosopher responding to Richter's ideas in his own lecture on wit and humour; as a writer of the ridiculous in relation to nature, society, and childhood; and as a figure of the ridiculous in both Romantic-period and later satires. The project will draw on current debates about aesthetics, particularly Sianne Ngai's work on aesthetic experiences with a lesser affective charge than the sublime, to foreground the ridiculous as an alternative approach to Romantic Studies, originating within Romanticism itself, and reconfiguring it from individual genius to collective joy. The project will lead to four types of output: 1. A co-authored book on The Romantic Ridiculous, drawing on the spirit of collaboration of Richter's ridiculous, and including work by me and the post-doctoral researcher. 2. A single-authored article (peer-reviewed) responding to Research Question 2, placing Jean Paul Richter's 'ridiculous' aesthetics in relation to 18th- and 19th-century philosophy, and aimed at publication in the leading international journal, Romanticism. 3. A collaborative article (peer-reviewed) responding to Research Question 5, on the legacies of Romanticism in children's literature, aimed at publication in Children's Literature Association Quarterly. 4. A project website, constructed using a free wordpress site, and hosted there for the duration of the project then stored in Edge Hill's Data Archive for the standard time of 10 years after the last request as detailed in the Data Mangagement Plan. The website will include a reflective blog on the development of the exhibition, providing a record of the collaborative activities on the project, as well as a record of the project's 'Table Talks' Events on the project include: 1. An exhibition entitled 'We Are Not Amused: Laughter in the Nineteenth Century' at the Atkinson, Southport, in November 2019, based on collaborative work with Edge Hill Nineteen, my university's 19thC research group, which will launch 'The Romantic Ridiculous' as a project. This exhibition is scheduled to take place before the start of the AHRC fellowship, demonstrating our already existing relationship upon which the project will build. 2. A travelling exhibition on 'The Romantic Ridiculous and the Romantic Child' produced in collaboration with North West secondary school students and displayed initially at Windermere Jetty: Museum of Boats, Steam and Stories. 3. A series of workshops called 'Table Talks' on new approaches to Romantic Studies

Dreaming Romantic Europe brings together scholars, scholarly associations and museums devoted to the study and presentation of European Romanticisms in an excitingly new, pan-European, cross-disciplinary network. It will hold three workshops Consuming Romanticism (2018), Romantic Authorship (2019), and Romantic Media (2020) at museums devoted to Romanticism, respectively the Musée de la Vie Romantique in Paris, the Museo Byron in Ravenna, and Dove Cottage in the Lake District. The workshops will explore Romanticism as a consciously trans-European phenomenon. Discussion will be focussed through the identification and consideration of iconic objects that epitomise or construct these aspects of Romanticism. These objects will be brought together in a major new public-facing collaboration, a plurilingual online museum of European Romanticisms, REVE (Romantic Europe: The Virtual Exhibit). REVE is the core research output of the network's activities. It is its central medium of cultural, intellectual, and creative exchange, collaboration, and experimentation; its principal mechanism for achieving impact both within and beyond academia; and a tangible, extendable project and legacy. REVE develops new ways of engaging academia, cultural heritage institutions, and the wider public with a new story of European Romanticisms. It aims to *display c. 100 objects *bring untouchable, fragile things out of store and up close *display the otherwise immovable *bring dispersed things into conjunction for the purposes of mutual illumination *show items from private collections rarely or never shown to the public *interpret lost iconic objects *narrate items in new technological formats *dramatise exhibits by releasing exhibits on anniversaries *include new creative responses to Romantic objects It will serve 1. as a laboratory within which to experiment with the technical and rhetorical possibilities for the digital display of objects and the consequent development of 'best practice' including the possibilities of collaborative virtual exhibition. 2. as a new, accessible, quality assured resource suitable for the study of Romanticisms at school and university level across European institutions, making important innovations and interventions in pedagogical practice. 3. as a means of engaging museum-going and non-museum-going publics across Europe, building a sense of a wider European literary heritage, and encouraging further imaginary and actual touristic adventures. In sum, our intellectual aims are to retrieve, revalue and re-present long-neglected transnational aspects of European Romanticisms as they emerged over the long nineteenth century. Through promoting conversation between very different traditions and institutions, we expect to stretch thinking about how best to think about, teach, and present European Romanticisms in the twenty-first century. The practical strategy underpinning this aim is to develop new pan-European professional and collaborative connections between academics and leading heritage organizations devoted to Romanticism. We expect in turn to produce the exchange of knowledge and ideas across national, linguistic, disciplinary, institutional and sectoral borders, and practical innovation and creative experimentation bearing on the futures of digital museum display and virtual visitor experience.

This network will bring together academics, museum personnel, consultants, stakeholders and community groups to investigate the colonial links of Romantic-period literary house museums and consider how best to interpret these links for a wider public. There is currently fierce public debate about how heritage sites and museums can best understand and represent the complex histories of the locations and objects they preserve. This debate creates a particular challenge for researching and curating literary house museums of the Romantic period (c. 1780-1830), an era when 'colonialism, in the form of exploratory initiatives, commercial enterprises and migratory settlement on the part of its citizens, contributed to a massive expansion in Britain's territorial possessions' (Carol Bolton, 'Romantic Literature and Colonialism', Literature Compass, 5/3 (2008): p. 541). The period's literary house museums bear to colonialism in numerous ways, but these histories frequently remain unexplored or untold. Moreover, because literary figures inspire reverence and widespread public respect, serious and rigorous engagements with relevant colonial legacies commonly face public and media hostility. The network will address this challenge and consider how best to respond strategically to the sensitivities involved. The network will begin by considering a specific case study, Wordsworth Grasmere, a site that includes Dove Cottage, the residence from 1799-1808 of Dorothy and William Wordsworth and from 1809-1820 of Thomas De Quincey. Maintained by the Wordsworth Trust (the network partner) for over a century, Wordsworth Grasmere has been a major heritage site and a leading literary house museum, receiving 40,000 visitors annually prior to the Covid pandemic. Its collection has Designated status as a 'vital part' of the England's 'national cultural and artistic heritage'. However, since the Wordsworths' and De Quincey's residence, and until now, there has been no concerted or sustained attempt to explore the multiple slavery and East India Company histories of Dove Cottage. The network will begin by addressing this legacy of silence and inaction. The network will then look beyond Wordsworth Grasmere to consider colonialism's complex issues and legacies in relation to the other Romantic-period literary house museums participating in the network, including: Abbotsford (Walter Scott); Jane Austen's House at Chawton; Robert Burns Birthplace Museum; Coleridge Cottage; Keats House; Newstead Abbey (Byron); and Wordsworth House (Cockermouth). The network will be academically interdisciplinary, including scholars of English Literature, History, Museum Studies and Tourism Studies. It will involve the participation of several related organisations and community groups with related concerns, including: American Writers Museum; Anne Frank Trust; Anti Racist Cumbria; Brontë Parsonage Museum; Museums&; National Trust. It will learn from the expertise of other specialists and projects in related areas, with input from consultants including Rachael Minott (chair of the Museums Association's Decolonising Guidance Working Group) and Laila Sumpton (who led 'Poetry versus Colonialism'). It will incorporate the voices of other stakeholders, including visitors, staff, volunteers, trustees, community and school groups. The network will create a set of resources to support literary house museums in researching their links with colonialism and interpreting them for a wider public. It will do so by organising three workshops, focusing initially on Wordsworth Grasmere's colonial links before expanding to share research questions and findings with a wider range of literary house museums. By collaborating on, comparing and contrasting these different cases studies, the network will enable these literary house museums to further research and represent the complex histories both of the sites they maintain and the writers those sites memorialise.

This project is the first major investigation of environmental catastrophe in Romantic writing. Until recently, approaches to Romanticism have often focused on how it addresses the rejuvenating power of localised nature, rather than examining its concern with larger-scale and potentially disruptive natural phenomena. This has not only had regrettable consequences for our understanding of the period's literature, but also meant that later environmental discourse has tended to draw on a narrow version of Romantic ecology. My fellowship will challenge the critical tendency to understand Romantic and post-Romantic nature writing as largely apolitical and concerned with individual and local experience. It is particularly concerned with how catastrophe was experienced and represented by communities, and how it put pressure on ideas of community. The project will make an innovative contribution not only to literary scholarship on the period, transforming our understanding of Romantic ecologies and their legacy, but also to the cultural history of climate change, and the field of disaster studies. As distinct from terms like 'disaster', catastrophe - from the Greek meaning an overturning, a sudden turn, a conclusion - indicates a major shift in the state of things that may well be destructive, but is not necessarily so. The environmental catastrophes addressed by this project include the heat death of the universe in Lord Byron's 'Darkness', the destruction of humanity 'by deluge' in Book Five of William Wordsworth's The Prelude, the geological separation of the British Isles from mainland Europe in Charlotte Smith's 'Beachy Head', and the joyous apocalypse at the end of Percy Bysshe Shelley's Prometheus Unbound. The project has four key research questions: (1) How did these writers understand the connection between political and environmental catastrophe in a global context? (2) How did catastrophe provoke Romantic writers to imagine new forms of community? (3) How is catastrophe registered in textual ambivalence and formal innovation? (4) What roles have Romantic-period representations of catastrophe played in the genealogy of present-day environmental writing? My Fellowship is timed for a crucial stage in the project and is split into two phases. Phase one addresses the bicentenary of the period from 1815-18, during which the world experienced severe weather disruption and subsistence crises, largely as a result of the eruption of the Indonesian volcano Mount Tambora in 1815. My focus in this phase will be on the completion of a short book entitled 1816: Community, Climate Change and British Romanticism. Phase two ranges critically across the cultural history of environmental catastrophe during the period and its later impacts. It will result in two articles, a commissioned book chapter, and a book proposal. Phase two also involves significant collaborative and leadership activities. I will co-produce a gallery displays and an ambitious outreach programme with the Wordsworth Trust around the topic of Romanticism, weather, and climate. I will also organise a conference entitled Climates of Writing, and work in partnership with the climate-change charity Cape Farewell to curate a related programme of cultural activities in Leeds, including a creative writing project and competition for young people. Apart from generating new insights into an important aspect of Romantic literature, the research will shed light on the relationship between writing, politics, and catastrophe across historical periods. The various outcomes of the project will be valuable to a wide range of international researchers: Romanticists; specialists in ecocriticism or the environmental humanities; cultural historians; and scholars working in the area of disaster studies. It will also benefit the organisations outside academia previously listed, as well as members of the public who attend and contribute to project events.