Alexander Regier’s Lecture: Awkwardness: A Poetics of Comparative Unease

24 Oct 2024 - 16:00 / 24 Oct 2024 - 18:00

The Centre for Comparative Literature and the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures welcomes Professor Alexander Regier (Department of Modern and Classical Literatures and Cultures, RICE University) to UofT to give a public lecture.

Awkwardness: A Poetics of Comparative Unease
Thursday October 24, 2024, 4-6pm
Room  B120,Student Commons Building (SU) – 230 College Street, Toronto

Alexander Regier is William Faulkner Professor of English and chair of the English department. He also holds a full appointment in the Department of Modern and Classical Literatures and Cultures.

In recent years, he has won fellowships at the National Humanities Center (2023), a research award from the National Endowment for the Humanities (2023), the Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship for Experienced Researchers (taken at the Ludwig-Maximilians University, Munich, 2018-20) as well as visiting fellowships at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities in Cambridge (2017), Clare Hall (Cambridge, 2017), and The University of Exeter (2015).

He is the author of the books Exorbitant Enlightenment: Blake, Hamann, and Anglo-German Constellations (Oxford University Press, 2018) and Fracture and Fragmentation in British Romanticism (Cambridge University Press, 2010). He has co-edited the collection Wordsworth’s Poetic Theory (Palgrave, 2010) as well as special journal issues on “Mobilities” and “Genealogies” and the Bloomsbury Handbook on Sports Writing 1789-2020, which is under contract.

Currently, he is completing a monograph on awkwardness as an aesthetic and political category (Awkwardness: The History and Art of Unease), and composing a book on the concept of the creaturely (Representing Creatures: Blake, Büchner, Quiroga, Celan). His commissioned volume on Blake, entitled Lesen macht Arbeit(The Labour of Reading), will appear in German.

Regier’s articles on “what is training?”, gendered language, Durs Grünbein’s prose, Wordsworth, Blake, Moravianism, ruins, Johann Georg Hamann, Walter Benjamin and street names, utopianism, and the aesthetics of sport have appeared in Sporting Cultures (ed. O’Quin; Tadie), Forum for Modern Language Studies, Durs Grünbein Today (ed. Young, Leeder), The Cambridge Companion to “Lyrical Ballads” (ed. Bushell), European Romantic Review, William Wordsworth in Context (ed. Bennett), The Byron Journal, William Blake in Context (ed. Haggarty), Ruins of Modernity (ed. Hell, Schönle), The Oxford Handbook of European Romanticism (ed. Hamilton), The Germanic Review, Tous azimuts, and Sport in History.

He served as the editor of the scholarly journal SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 from 2011-22.