Display of Ernest de Selincourt Materials: 2026 marks the centenary of the publication of the thirteen-book version of William Wordsworth’s The Prelude. The poem, completed by the poet in 1805, was unearthed and edited by the University of Birmingham Professor, Ernest de Selincourt. Its appearance in 1926 has shaped a century of Romantic studies. The conference will feature a display of de Selincourt’s papers from the University of Birmingham’s Cadbury Archives, which will also be made available online.
John Constable, Sky Study with Rainbow, 1827, Yale Centre for British Art
A film series featuring It Ain’t Half Racist, Mum (1979) • African Oasis (1982) • Traces Left (1983) • Giro: Is This the Modern World? (1985) • Language is the Key (1985) • Paradise Circus (1988)
Various Wednesdays 6-8pm, April-June 2026 at BRIG Cafe, The Warehouse, 54-57 Allison Street, Birmingham, B5 5TH. Screening details and booking here.
This series is organised by the Stuart Hall Archive Project team. For enquiries about the film screenings please contact Dr John Fagg (j.m.fagg@bham.ac.uk) or Professor Daniel McNeil (d.mcneil@bham.ac.uk)
Britain has never been a finished picture — it’s a work‑in‑progress, a long edit, a frame that keeps shifting. This film series brings that truth to the screen.
Drawing on the radical traditions of the Birmingham Film & Video Workshop (BFVW) and the critical imagination of Stuart Hall, these films invite audiences to rethink how stories of place, identity, and power are made — and who gets to make them. Across six bold works from the 1970s and 80s, we encounter a Britain alive with cultural struggle and creative resistance.
This is cinema as confrontation, cinema as community, cinema as the start of a conversation that young people continue today — about justice, belonging, resistance, and the right to shape the images that shape us.
Each event in the series includes a post-screening conversation with the filmmakers, offering audiences deeper insight into the work.
Our annual lecture, a collaboration between Arts of Place and OCLW, brings together thinking about place with some of the most exciting current work in the fields of biography and life-writing. Lives happen in places; places shape lives and have lives of their own. For 2026 we welcome Professor Karen Karbiener from New York University.
How does a poet become profoundly connected to places he’s never been or even written about?
Walt Whitman (1819–1892), often celebrated as ‘The Poet of New York’, never travelled beyond North America and spent most of his life in only a few locations. Yet he remains a living presence in Bolton, a former Lancashire mill town, where an annual ‘Whitman Walk’ through the surrounding countryside has taken place, with occasional interruptions, since 1887.
This unlikely connection began in the 1880s with the Eagle Street College, a group of Bolton readers—clerks, professionals, and workers—who gathered to read and discuss Leaves of Grass. The group corresponded with Whitman in Camden, New Jersey, sent him birthday greetings, and helped circulate his work in Britain, interpreting his poetry as a powerful articulation of democracy, equality, and social transformation.
Examining life-writing, poetry, and place, this lecture will appeal to anyone curious about how readers and communities shape a poet’s legacy—and how literature can travel far beyond the locations of a writer’s own life. It will also be of interest to students and scholars of American literature, history, and transatlantic cultural history. No prior specialist knowledge or preparation is required.
Professor Karen Karbiener is an internationally recognised Whitman scholar and a Distinguished Teaching Award-winning professor at New York University. She has published widely and curated several exhibitions on the poet; she is also president of the Walt Whitman Initiative, a non-profit organisation serving as an organising centre for cultural activism and poetry-related events. Karen is currently at work on American Kosmos: The Lives, Loves, and Worlds of Walt Whitman (Harper Collins, 2027), the first full-length biography of the poet in over 25 years.
After the event, please join Arts of Place for a complimentary wine reception.
The event will be recorded and made available on the Arts of Place and OCLW websites soon after.
Location: The Arts Building is R16 in the Red Zone shown on this campus map. Regular trains from Birmingham New Street stop at University Station (10-minutes’ walk from the venue). You are warmly invited to explore the campus if you have time. You’ll find a park-like space in the ‘Green Heart’ and a range of cafes, including at the Bramall Music Building near the clock tower.
Wednesday 29 April 2026, 10-4pm. Arts Building Room 250 and Lecture Room 2.
This is a joint session with UoB’s Nineteenth-Century Centre. Colleagues will be sharing research in progress and exploring cross-currents in work on nineteenth-century writing, place, and environment.
Places are limited for this event, but if you would like to attend for all or part of the day we’d be glad to hear from you. UoB staff and students with relevant interests, from any department, are particularly encouraged to be in touch. Please email Alexandra Harris (a.harris.2@bham.ac.uk) and Matthew Ward (m.ward.1@bham.ac.uk).
DRAFT PROGRAMME
Session One: 10-11.30am
Jessica Fay, ‘Dorothy Wordsworth in Place’
Hugh Adlington, ‘Teaching Literature and the Land’
Ellie Dobson, ‘Pompeii and the Uncanny’
—Tea and coffee break (Refreshments provided)—
Session Two: 11.50am-1.10pm
Jon Stevens, ‘The Romantics in Bruges’
Matthew Ward ‘Byron and the “sea-born city” of Allusion’
—Lunch (Not provided)—
Session Three: 2.30-4pm
John Holmes, ‘Reading Walks in Ruskin Land: Literature, Forests and Nature Recovery’
Andrew Hodgson, ‘Beddoes’s “Last Judgement”’
Oliver Herford, ‘Henry James tracks Robert Louis Stevenson’
—Drinks and Conversation at Edgbaston Park Hotel—
John Constable, Sir Richard Steele’s Cottage, Hampstead, 1831-2, Yale Center for British Art
Daphne Astor was a writer, publisher, philanthropist, farmer, and environmentalist with an extraordinary gift for encouraging and enabling others. Daphne was a loyal supporter of Arts of Place from the first, coming regularly to our online seminars and championing the work of speakers she heard. Her punchy and insightful contributions always brought a new perspective to the subject at hand, whether she was urging us to think more about contemporary farming or to visit the places of the poet George Crabbe. Even when she was ill and knew her time was limited, she logged on, listened, and shared her knowledge. Daphne died in July 2024 and she is remembered with deep appreciation by the Arts of Place community.
Hazel Press, which she founded, continues to publish new work with a focus on environment and the arts.
Tuesday 18 June 2024, 5pm, University of Birmingham
Our annual lecture, a collaboration between Arts of Place and OCLW, brings together thinking about place with some of the most exciting current work in the fields of biography and life-writing. Lives happen in places; places shape lives and have lives of their own.
We were delighted to welcome Fiona Stafford, FBA, Professor of English at the University of Oxford, scholar of Romantic literature, and author of bestselling books on our relationships to the natural world and our local surroundings.
‘Landscapes, seascapes, skyscapes – seemingly empty spaces often turn out to be full of life and hidden lives. A solitary walk is a chance to listen to waves or leaves, to catch sight of birds and wildlife, to sense the people who once lived and worked there. Writing the long, long life of landscape means attending to what seems odd or out of place, to unexpected openings into the past. A bridge from nowhere to nowhere, an old oak in a birchwood, a red squirrel, a half-submerged church, an echoing sea cave, or an enigmatic placename – cracks in the present, opening the way into other times and other lives.’
with guest speaker Dr James Bainbridge (Liverpool)
Monday 22 January, with Jessica Fay in response and conversation.
Botany was a key interest of the poet George Crabbe. “Give me a wild, wide Fen, in a foggy day,” he wrote, “and every botanist [is] an Adam who explores and names the creatures he meets with.” Between the publication of The Newspaper in 1785 and the 1807 Poems, much of his writing focused on the production of new botanical works. But this was a period of great change for English botany, and whilst Crabbe made use of competing Systems to arrange the natural world as he observed it, he was also drawn to the disorderly fringes of the science – things that were difficult to classify.
In January 2024, James Bainbridge joined us to examine the ways botany shaped Crabbe’s poetry, from the minuteness of detail in his description, to the study of distinction between individual subjects. James is a Lecturer in English at the University of Liverpool. He teaches and researches in eighteenth and twentieth-century literature with a particular interest in the influence of theology and natural sciences on the literature of the long-eighteenth century. He is currently writing a biography of the poet A.S.J. Tessimond and publishes regularly on Crabbe.
Watch the recording of this talk below and read on for some highlights.
Why do so few people read Crabbe today? By way of introduction, James explained why this is not a new question. Though he counted Thomas Hardy, Jane Austen, Walter Scott, Ivan Turgunev, Leo Tolstoy, George Eliot and Elizabeth Gaskell amongst his admirers, Crabb quickly fell out of favour in the 19th century:
“What the novel does in the nineteenth century takes its seeds in what Crabbe is doing in poetry, and partly because he was writing in poetry, he quickly went out of fashion”
Against, Virginia Woolf’s alignment of Crabbe with weeds, James suggested that
“On the whole, Crabbe tends to describe the mallow and the bugloss, not because he thinks of them as weeds, but rather because he thinks of them as native species. That word native is used extensively in his writing to think about place, to think about people, to think about plants. These plants aren’t described by their not belonging, but rather the reverse. Crabbe is drawn to them because they belong to the specific places he describes.”
Discussing The Borough (1810), James presented an astonishing case for how Crabbe deployed a taxonomical arrangement to articulate similarities and differences, order and disorder, amongst his characters, places, and environments:
“The emphasis on locality in these works indicates an almost proto-ecological interest in nature which appears even more prominent in a work he proposed to write on trefoils. In this he declared an ambition to give ‘a narration of the progressive Vegetation of the spot it grows on, etc. etc. etc’; the emphasis clearly placed on the way that habitats change through successions of plant life.”
James ultimately argued that in The Borough
“Crabbe show the relationship between botany and place. There is offered a particular bed that fits the seed. He considers how over time a place may change due to the succession of plants which dwell there. And it is this level of narrative which he felt was lacking from simple taxonomic arrangement, and why in both his botany and poetry he moved towards a more ecological approach. Crabbe botanical interests, far from being mere adornments to the poetry, are integral to his narrative and thematic development. His descriptions of plants and landscapes are not just backdrop but they are interwoven with the human stories that he tells.”
‘Writing the Generations: Time, Place, and Family Memory in Early Modern England’
Wednesday 26 April, 5pm, The University of Birmingham
“England’s long Reformation was, in multiple respects, a family affair; and indeed, a family quarrel”
Our annual lecture, a collaboration between Arts of Place and OCLW, brings together thinking about place with some of the most exciting current work in the fields of biography and life-writing. Lives happen in places; places shape lives and have lives of their own.
We were delighted in 2023 to welcome one of the leading historians of our times: Alexandra Walsham, CBE, FBA, Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge. Her book The Reformation of the Landscape, well-thumbed on many Arts of Place bookshelves, shaped understandings of how the landscape was perceived in early modern Britain when layers of Pagan and Catholic belief and culture were written over by waves of Protestant reform. Alexandra’s new book, Generations, is out this spring, and brings a wealth of evidence from local and family archives to questions of generational identity, belief, sense of time and sense of place.
Listen to Alexandra’s extraordinary lecture below:
Read on for some highlights from the lecture.
“The generation, understood as both a social cohort and a biological unit, is a neglected site of life-writing and record-keeping. This lecture seeks to explore the significance of families of blood and faith in the preservation of the past and in the creation of legacies for posterity. By focusing on individuals and communities who derived their identities from a shared location in time, it offers a fresh perspective on the intersection between the arts of memory and the arts of place in early modern England.”
Alexandra sketches out a foundational question: what is a generation? In religious early modern England, she continues, generation “denoted origin and pedigree, community, history, chronology and eternity”. Generations were a way to plot genealogy and ancestry; they signalled “a place of abode in the fabric of time”, as well as being “singularly relevant to the story of Christianity”.
Treating the generation as a site of memory, Alexandra lecture leads us on a journey through a rich collection of ars memoriae, considering how personal texts and artefacts construct places in which the living come into contact with generations past. We are treated to the lineages traced in family bibles—personal transcriptions and scribbles demonstrative both of fecundity and decline. We are brought to engraved memorial objects; to heirlooms passed down or gone astray; and to graffiti scratched into walls. All demonstrate the exceptional biographical capacity of such objects, as well as illustrating the importance of the generation to early modern culture.
Alexandra leaves us with a poignant reminder of the strange lives of the objects and texts discussed, and invites us to consider their place within the histories of both a private and public England:
“Ironically, the presence of the manuscripts, books and objects discussed in local and national archives, libraries and museums, indicates the breaking of the generational chain that ensured their preservation down the centuries. However, it also represents their transformation into forms of public patrimony. This is sometimes a consequence of the fact that they have been detached from their original contexts, passed into the hands of collectors, and gradually shed their status as treasured possessions and talismans of genealogical memory. But sometimes it indexes the desire of individual families to find a more secure place of safekeeping, or to make these relics of their personal histories into the resources for the wider community. For all those discovered in dusty boxes, or rescued from attics festooned with dirty cobwebs, others have been lost or still remain in private hands”.
Image: William Brooke, 10th Baron Cobham and his Family, Master of the Countess of Warwick, 1567
Monday 6 March, UoB Arts Building 103 (Constance Naden Room)
with guest speaker Paddy Bullard
Arts of Place is delighted to welcome Paddy Bullard to Birmingham for discussion and reflections on the links between land and labour in literary history. In the 50th anniversary year of Raymond Williams’s The Country and the City, Paddy will reflect on why paying serious attention to rural life should still be central to understanding culture.
Paddy is the editor of A History of English Georgic Writing, a major book about a ‘vital green force in literary history’, available now and online here (with library log-on). He has written widely on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literary culture, book history, and politics as well as working closely with the Museum of English Rural Life and developing pioneering projects on craft and manual skills.
There’ll be responses from UoB staff and students and open conversation over a glass of wine.
Recollections is the account of a six week long tour of Scotland that Dorothy Wordsworth undertook with her brother William and with Samuel Taylor Coleridge in August and September 1803. Filled with entertaining reports of the 663-mile journey, hand-drawn maps of lakes and rivers, and occasional poems by William, the travelogue paints a detailed picture of the Scottish landscape and its people. Dorothy’s characteristically vivid landscape descriptions combine romantic and picturesque aesthetics. She allows the reader almost to step into the Scottish Highlands themselves and see what she saw. Apart from the changing Scottish landscape Dorothy repeatedly notes how the ’employments of the people are so immediately connected with the places where you find them’, thus encouraging the reader to think about the distinct connection between people and place that shapes their manners and customs.
