This unique event will bring together four scholarly societies from three continents: it is a supernumerary conference of the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism (NASSR), also supported by the British Association for Romantic Studies (BARS), the German Society for English Romanticism (GER), and the Japan Association of English Romanticism (JAER).

Over the last two decades, there has been sustained scholarly interest in the connections between European Romanticism and the peoples, cultures, and literatures of the rest of the world. In addition to discussing representations of the “East” by Romantic authors, there has been a growing trend towards viewing Romanticism itself in a global context, as a movement shaped by wider eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century forces of trade, migration, material circulation, intellectual exchange, slavery, and colonialism. 

Drawing on the conference's location in Tokyo, this conference will consider the broader task of forging connections between Eastern and Western literature and scholarship. In a Japanese context, the idea of interpersonal “connection” (kizuna) takes on a different resonance, because of its close connection to the project of recovery (saisei) following the 2011 Great East Japan earthquake and tsunami. This conference wishes to explore how such acts of cross-cultural translation offer the possibility of reciprocal transformations of meaning.

The conference welcomes explorations of the reception of European Romanticism in Asia and other regions of the world, as well as discussions of the future status of Romanticism studies in a geographically diverse and technologically connected scholarly world.