Luisa Calè

020 7631 6090
l.cale@bbk.ac.uk
room 506, 30 Russell Sq.
Course Director, MA Cultural and Critical Studies
Office Hour: Mondays 5-6, or by appointment

I am a lecturer in the Department of English and Humanities. I have studied at Rome ‘La Sapienza’, Genoa and Oxford. I teach on interdisciplinary BA courses in Humanities and the MA Cultural and Critical Studies. This year I am teaching Romanticism; I am lecturing on The Production of the Human (Candide, Frankenstein, Marx, Fanon), and leading seminars on 'Visualising the Human', 'Screening the Human 1 & 2', and 'Debating the Human' for Introduction to Cultural Studies. At the MA level I am teaching the Core Course on Culture, Technologies and the Senses and the option Exhibiting Cultures. At the BA level I have also taught Literature and Visual Culture (2004-5), Literature and Empire (2004, 2005-6), and Cosmopolitan Identities and Migrations (2005-6). At the MA level I have designed the options Polis/Cosmopolis and Exhibiting Cultures and the Graduate Theory Seminars on 'Visual Theory',  'New Media', and 'Reading'.

I work in the field of Literature and Visual Culture, with special emphasis on forms of adaptation and textual transmission in the Romantic Period.  In my book Henry Fuseli’s Milton Gallery: ‘Turning Readers into Spectators’ (Oxford University Press, 2006) I explore exhibitions as aesthetic forms that turned 'readers into spectators' when exhibitions became a vibrant component of Romantic public culture. I am also interested in other forms of literary adaptation and visual entertainments such as comic operas and ballets. I am currently working on the relationship between reading and collecting and the book as a visual form, from extra-illustration to artists' books. I have also written about visual cultural practices and reader response theory, Milton, Blake, Lamb, Fuseli and the Enlightenment, the 1790s, and intermedial readings of Dante’s Commedia by Tom Phillips and Peter Greenaway. I have co-edited Dante on View: The Reception of Dante in the Visual and Performing Arts (Ashgate, 2007). I have also organised the conferences Romanticism and Visual Culture (2000), Books, Scrapbooks and Albums (2006) and co-organised (with Sally Ledger, Patrizia di Bello, and Ella Dzelzainis) The Verbal and the Visual in Nineteenth-Century Culture (2006), and (with Catharine Edwards and Kate Nichols) Exhibiting Antiquity (2008). Starting from work emerging from this conference Patrizia di Bello and I have selected papers on print culture for a special issue of 19 and are currently editing Illustrations, Optics and Objects in 19C Literary and Visual Culture (Palgrave, forthcoming). With Adriana Craciun (Univ. of California, Riverside) and Luciana Martins (Birkbeck), I am organizing Romantic Disorder: Predisciplinarity and the Divisions of Knowledge 1750-1850 (London, 18-20 June 2008).

I would welcome graduate applications in Romantic Studies, Visual Culture and Visual Theory.