This one-day interdisciplinary conference organised in collaboration with Dr Catherine Redford (University of Oxford) will bring together academics from various disciplines including English, History, Theology, History of Art, and Music to reassess the numerous responses to the idea of apocalypse produced during the ‘long’ eighteenth century. A plenary lecture will be given by Professor Fiona Stafford (Professor of English Language and Literature, University of Oxford).

Following the conference, a showcase of musical and literary performances will take place at St George’s Crypt, Oxford Castle.

The conference runs from 9:30-18:30 at the Radcliffe Humanities Building and the showcase runs from 18:15-18:45 at St George's Crypt, Oxford Castle.

Registration is now open (see our website for further details).

PROGRAMME:

9.30 Registration opens

10.15 Welcome and Introduction: Dr Catherine Redford and Emily Knight, University of Oxford

10.30 Panel A
The Eighteenth-Century Apocalyptic Imagination: The Interpretative Landscape (Chair: Amelia Greene)

• Dr Jonathan Downing, University of Bristol: ‘The Commentators’ Apocalypse: The Interpretation of Biblical Eschatology in Eighteenth-Century Popular Commentaries’

• Professor Stephen Bygrave, University of Southampton: ‘Improvement and Apocalypse: Joseph Priestley’s Rhetoric in the 1790s’

Panel B
The Last Man (Chair: Eva-Charlotta Mebius)

• Dr Claire Sheridan, University of Greenwich: ‘Apocalypse as Domestic Melodrama: Dibdin Pitt’s The Last Man; or, the Miser of Eltham Green’

• Audrey Borowski, University of Oxford: ‘The Strange Indetermination of Cousin de Grainville’s “Last Man”’

• Dr Adrian Tait, Independent Scholar: ‘Intimations of Apocalypse: From Mary Shelley’s The Last Man to M. P. Shiel’s The Purple Cloud’

12.00 Sandwich lunch

12.45 Panel A
Revelation/Revelations (Chair: Christian Zolles)

• Dr Natasha O’Hear, University of St Andrews: ‘Four Become One: The Preoccupation with the Fourth Horseman of the Apocalypse in the Eighteenth Century’

• Joanna Raisbeck, University of Oxford: ‘The Post-Kantian Apocalypse: Revelatory Visions in Jean Paul and Karoline von Günderrode’

• Randall Reinhard, University of Edinburgh: ‘The Revelation of Edward Irving: The Apocalypse as Social Criticism’

Panel B
Secular Apocalypse: Nature and the Human (Chair: TBC)

• Amelia Greene, City University of New York: ‘Uncovered Earth: Scaled Apocalypse in John Clare’

• Lucia Scigliano, Durham University: ‘“What faith is crushed, what empires bleed”: Apocalypse and Nature in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Hellas’

• Adam D. J. Laity, University of the West of England: ‘The Last Man, the Rückenfigur and Mad Max: Romantic Subjectivism and “the human” within the Apocalyptic Sublime Landscape’

2.15 Tea & Coffee

2.45 Panel A
Ruin and Catastrophe (Chair: Audrey Borowski)

• Dr Jessica Stacey, King’s College London: ‘Apocalypse of Meaning: Catastrophes of Language in Eighteenth-Century France’

• Thomas Moynihan, University of Oxford: ‘Human Extinction and Romanticism: The Intellectual Discovery of the End of Thought’

• Dr Helen Slaney, University of Oxford: ‘Original Ruins’

Panel B
Apocalyptic Afterlives (Chair: TBC)
• Dr Christian Zolles, University of Vienna: ‘Modern Apocalypse in Reverse: Edgar Allan Poe’s Dialogue The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion (1839)’

• Tom Bromwell, University of York: ‘A Sublime Armageddon: First World War Artists and the Burkean Sublime’

• Dr Catherine Redford, University of Oxford: ‘From Mary Shelley to H. G. Wells: The Romantic Last Man Reimagined’

4.15 Plenary lecture
Professor Fiona Stafford, University of Oxford: 'Barkless, branchless, blighted: Alpine Apocalypse in 1816'

5.15 Closing remarks; walk to Oxford Castle

6.15 Showcase in St. George’s Crypt, Oxford Castle: A selection of musical and literary imaginings of the Last Man on earth from the Romantic period (running time: 30 mins)

7.00 Dinner