ORGANISERS

Mary Fairclough is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York, and Director of the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies. Her two monographs The Romantic Crowd: Sympathy, Controversy and Print Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2013) and Literature, Electricity and Politics 1740-1840: Electrick Communication Every Where (Palgrave, 2017) investigate how the affective language of sympathy and electricity accounted for a huge range of emotional and physical feeling in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, from sexual attraction to riotous political unrest. She has also published several articles on affective communication in the Romantic period, in works by Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley and Thomas Beddoes. She teaches an undergraduate module at York ‘Feeling the Eighteenth Century’ and lectures on Affect and Emotion.

Alexandra Kingston-Reese is a Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Literature in the Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York, and the Editor of ASAP/J. Her first monograph Contemporary Novelists and the Aesthetics of Twenty First Century American Life (University of Iowa Press, 2020) interrogated the categories of aesthetic attention as modeled by contemporary art novels and essays. She is the editor of a forthcoming collection called The Art Essay (University of Iowa Press, 2021), which positions the art essay as a major literary form, and is currently working on her second monograph on negative affect, ethics, and rhetoric in the contemporary novel and essays. She teaches an MA module at York called 'Bad Feelings'.