Merve Emre Merve Emre is associate professor of English at the University of Oxford. She is the author of Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), The Ferrante Letters (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019), and The Personality Brokers (Doubleday: New York, 2018), which was selected as one of the best books of 2018 by the New York Times, the Economist, NPR, CBC, and the Spectator, and has been adapted for CNN/HBO Max as the documentary feature film Persona. She is the editor of Once and Future Feminist (Cambridge: MIT, 2018), The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway (New York: Liveright, 2021), and The Norton Modern Library Mrs. Dalloway (New York: Norton, 2021).

Her essays and criticism have appeared in publications ranging from The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Harper's, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, and the London Review of Books to American Literature, American Literary History, and Modernism/modernity. In 2019, she was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize, and her work has been supported by the Whiting Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Leverhulme Trust, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Quebec, and the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin, where she is a fellow from 2020-2021. She is currently finishing a book titled Post-Discipline: Literature, Professionalism, and the Crisis of the Humanities (under contract with the University of Chicago Press) and starting a book called Woman: The History of an Idea (under contract with Doubleday US / Harper Collins UK).

Merve Emre's paper is titled “Critical Love Studies”.

David James is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Literature at the University of Birmingham, before which he was Reader in English at Queen Mary, University of London. His recent books include Modernist Futures (Cambridge University Press, 2012) and Discrepant Solace: Contemporary Literature and the Work of Consolation (Oxford University Press, 2019), along with edited volumes such as The Legacies of Modernism (Cambridge University Press, 2012), The Cambridge Companion to British Fiction since 1945 (Cambridge University Press, 2015), and Modernism and Close Reading (Oxford University Press, 2020). He is an Associated Editor at Contemporary Literature, and for Columbia University Press he co-edits the book series Literature Now. He is currently completing Sentimental Activism (forthcoming with Columbia University Press), a book about the political dynamics of affective solicitation in contemporary fiction, refugee writing, medical memoir, and the dispositions of cultural criticism.

Click here to access the abstract of David James' paper "'Asylum for Compassion?' Valeria Luiselli's Sentimental Activisim".

Erin Lafford is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in English at the University of Derby. Her research focuses on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature and culture, and especially on representations of illness, emotion, and environments. She has a special interest in the poetry of John Clare and is the co-editor with Simon Kövesi of Palgrave Advances in John Clare Studies (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). She is currently working on her first monograph John Clare and the Poetry of Illness.

Erin Lafford's paper is titled "John Clare's Carelessness".

Noreen Masud is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Department of English at the University of Durham. She researches literary texts, particularly poetry, which don’t behave as readers expect - which seem embarrassing, nonsensical, boring or perverse – but which might give shape to underacknowledged feelings and modes of relationship. Her first book (forthcoming OUP 2021) is on aphorisms: short texts which might help us manage disorderly feelings. She is writing a second book on flat landscapes in twentieth century literature, and the surprising feelings associated with flatness.

Noreen Masud's paper is titled “Forgetting (with) Gertrude Stein”.

Kate Singer is Associate Professor of English; Chair of Critical Social Thought at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts. Her research explores questions of poetics, epistemology, gender, affect, and media in the Romantic period. She is the author of Romantic Vacancy: The Poetics of Gender, Affect, and Radical Speculation (SUNY Press, 2019). Her work has been published in Studies in Romanticism, European Romantic Review, The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy, and Literature Compass.

Click here to access the abstract of Kate Singer's paper "Feelings Change: Ontologies of Affective Change in Spinoza, Hume, Shelley, & Prince".

Ross Wilson is Lecturer in Criticism in the Faculty of English at the University of Cambridge. His research investigates the literature, philosophy and aesthetics of the nineteenth century. He is the author of Shelley and the Apprehension of Life (Cambridge University Press, 2013) and essays in the Oxford Handbook of Victorian Poetry, Textual Practice, and New Literary History.

Click here to access the abstract of Ross Wilson's paper "Breathe, Fidget, Scratch, Cough, Sniffle, Drink—Lecture: The Affect of the Lecture from Lowth to Panopto".

Xine Yao is Lecturer in American Literature in English to 1900 at University College London. Xine’s primary research focuses on early and nineteenth-century American literature through affect theory, critical race and ethnic studies, and feminist and queer of colour theory. Her first book Disaffected: The Cultural Politics of Unfeeling in Nineteenth-Century America is under contract with Duke University Press in the Perverse Modernities series.

Xine Yao's paper is titled "Disaffected: The Cultural Politics of Unfeeling".