Dr Luisa Calè
-
Overview
Overview
Biography
I am a Reader in Romantic and Nineteenth-Century Literature and Visual Culture. I joined Birkbeck in 2004. I was educated in Italy (Rome, Genoa), moved to Britain with a fellowship from the Accademia dei Lincei in 1997, then took an M.St. and a D.Phil at the University of Oxford, and subsequently held a postdoctoral fellowship at University College Oxford. My teaching career started in Italy as an Erasmus Language instructor under the European Union Lingua programme; when I moved to the UK I taught Italian at the University of Oxford, before switching to English Literature.
I work on the visual and material cultures of literature in the Romantic Period, practices of reading, viewing, and collecting that dismantle the book and question its function as a support for reading, and on critical disciplinarity. My research reconstructs a hybrid history of the book that subverts distinctions between book parts and artworks. I have published on how literature is reinvented through galleries of pictures; the visual reinvention of Dante's Commedia; William Blake and his reception in Italy; altered editions of Shakespeare, Walpole, Blake, and Dickens.
My research has been funded by the Wingate Fundation, University College Oxford, the Huntington Library, the Lewis Walpole Library at Yale, the Yale Center for British Art, and most recently the Leverhulme Trust.
Highlights
Sibylline Leaves, special issue of Studies in Romanticism, co-edited with Marianne Brooker.
'The Book Unbound: Material Cultures of Reading and Collecting, c.1750-1850', funded by the Leverhulme Trust, described in Grant in focus.
Qualifications
- DPhil, University of Oxford , 2002
- MSt Research Methods in English, University of Oxford, 1998
- PhD, Genoa, 1997
- Letters Degree, University of Rome 'La Sapienza', 1993
Administrative responsibilities
- Research Lead, School of Creative Arts, Culture and Communication (2023-2026)
Professional activities
Exhibitions Editor, Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly
Associate Editor, Word & Image (2023-2025)
Advisory Board, Studies in Romanticism
Editorial Board, Romantic Circles Gallery
Editorial Board, 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century
Steering Group, intercollegiate London-Paris Romanticism Seminar hosted by the Institute of English Studies, Senate House
Co-Convenor, Birkbeck Eighteenth-Century Research Group
Member, Birkbeck Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies
Professional memberships
Fellow, English Association
Honours and awards
- Research Fellowship, Leverhulme Trust, December 2019
- Travel Grant, Lewis Walpole Library, December 2019
- Mercator Fellow, 2018-19, Journal Forschergruppe Journalliteratur, Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DfG2088 , December 2018
- Visiting Fellowship, Yale Center for British Art, December 2010
- Visiting Fellowship, Huntington Library, San Marino California, December 2007
- Visiting Fellowship, Lewis Walpole Library, February 2003
- Junior Research Fellowship, University College Oxford, December 2001
- Doctoral Grant, Wingate Foundation, December 1998
- Vaciago Prize, Accademia dei Lincei, December 1997
- Senior Scholarship, St Hugh's College Oxford, December 1998
ORCID
0000-0001-8634-2674 -
Research
Research
Research interests
- Romantic literature and visual culture
- material texts and history of the book
- history of collecting
- critical disciplinarity
- print culture
- Romantic period translations and adaptations
Research overview
I work on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature, visual, and material culture. My research defamiliarizes the book as a support for reading, unveiling a range of practices in which reading and writing intersect with practices of viewing and collecting as part of an intermedial poetics that cuts across current disciplines and divisions of knowledge. I am interested in questions of intermedial translation and adaptation, multisensorial cultural practices, Romantic aesthetics, and critical disciplinarity. Thinking about practices of composition that connect the page to the gallery wall, the imaginary museum and the museum of words, my work offers new interpretations of Horace Walpole, William Blake, Henry Fuseli, Leigh Hunt, Charles Lamb, and John Milton, among others.
My new project is about Exodus and Visual Storytelling. I published a pilot essay on Blake's watercolour Pestilence and the politics of feeling in European Romantic Review (2022). The next steps of this project will address visual storytelling in individual images, series, and extra-illustrated Bibles, exploring how different material formats and practices open up alternative dynamics of sympathy.
I am completing a project entitled ‘The Book Unbound’, funded by the Leverhulme Trust, which explores practices of reading and collecting that question, subvert, or dismantle the book as a cultural form, including Walpole, Blake, and Dickens. In this area I have published essays on Blake, 'Dickens Extra-illustrated', 'Extra-illustrations: the order of the book and the fantasia of the library', 'Extra-illustration and Ephemera', and co-edited a special issue of Studies in Romanticism on Sibylline Leaves.
On the visual culture of reading and the emergence of exhibitions, I have published Henry Fuseli’s Milton Gallery: ‘Turning Readers into Spectators’ (Oxford University Press, 2006); 'Leigh Hunt's Paper Gallery: Reading Spenser through the Old Masters in 1833 and 1844', La Questione Romantica (2013); '"A Gallery in the Mind': William Hazlitt, Edmund Spenser, and the Old Masters', Tate Papers, 24 (Autumn 2015); 'On the Dynamics of Periodical Illustration: the 'Cornhill Magazine' from Monthly to Codex to Gallery' (2022).
On reading and intermediality, I have co-edited Dante on View: The Reception of Dante in the Visual and Performing Arts (Ashgate 2007), which contains my essay on Tom Phillips and Peter Greenaway’s Dante, a special issue of 19 on print culture, and Supervision and teaching
Supervision and teaching
Supervision
I welcome graduate applications in Romantic period literature and visual and/or material culture;
- cultures of reading and collecting, material texts, and history of the book 1750-1850;
- nineteenth-century periodical culture;
- adaptations and translations;
- critical disciplinarity.
Current doctoral researchers
-
ELEANOR FRANZEN
Doctoral alumni since 2013-14
-
GERRIE VAN NOORD
-
MARIANNE BROOKER
-
JAMES LESSLIE
-
ALEXIS WOLF
-
REES ARNOTT-DAVIES
Teaching
I teach on BA English, BA Liberal Arts, and MA Victorian Studies.
Teaching modules
- Connecting the Arts (AREN126S5)
- Modernising Victorians (AREN166S7)
- Progress and Anxiety, 1789-1859 (AREN232S7)
- Curating the Nineteenth Century (AREN302S7)
- Writing London (ENHU007S4)
- The Novel: Writing the Modern World (ENHU009S5)
- Literature and Visual Culture (ENHU084S6)
- Publications
Publications
Article
- Calè, Luisa (2024) ‘Knowledge is Power’: literature, invention, radical thinking at the London Mechanics’ Institution. 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 36, ISSN 1755-1560.
- Cale, Luisa (2023) Blake and exhibitions, 2022. Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly 57 (1), ISSN 0160-628X.
- Calè, Luisa (2022) William Blake’s “Fourfold Vision”: a practical antiquary’s visionary contemplations among the “Couches of the Dead”. Modern Philology 120 (1), pp. 24-48. ISSN 0026-8232.
- Calè, Luisa (2022) William Blake’s 'Pestilence', sympathy, and the politics of feeling. European Romantic Review 33 (4), pp. 515-533. ISSN 1050-9585.
- Calè, Luisa (2022) Reading revolutions: Corrado Costa’s William Blake in Beulah, a visionary cartoon essay in 1977 Italy. Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly 55 (3), ISSN 0160-628x.
- Calè, Luisa (2021) Blake and Exhibitions, 2020. Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly 55 (1), ISSN 0160-628x.
- Calè, Luisa (2020) “A Dream of Thiralatha”: promiscuous book gatherings and the wanderings of Blake’s separate plates. Studies in Romanticism 59 (4), pp. 431-445. ISSN 0039-3762.
- Calè, Luisa (2020) Modern Sibyls and sibylline media. Studies in Romanticism 59 (1), pp. 45-69. ISSN 0039-3762.
- Calè, Luisa (2020) Extra-illustration and ephemera: altered books and the alternative forms of the fugitive page. Eighteenth-Century Life 44 (2), pp. 111-135. ISSN 0098-2601.
- Calè, Luisa and Evangelista, S. (2018) ”A Bright Erroneous Dream": The Shelley Memorial and the body of the Poet. Word and Image 34 (1), pp. 17-31. ISSN 0266-6286.
- Calè, Luisa (2017) Blake, Young, and the poetics of the composite page. Huntington Library Quarterly 80 (3), pp. 453-479. ISSN 0018-7895.
- Calè, Luisa (2017) Historic doubts, conjectures, and the wanderings of a principal curiosity: Henry VII in the fabric of Strawberry Hill. Word & Image 33 (3), pp. 279-291. ISSN 0266-6286.
- Calè, Luisa and Parejo Vadillo, Ana (2015) In the cloud: Nineteenth-Century visions and experiments for the digital age. 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 21, ISSN 1755-1560.
- Calè, Luisa (2015) Leigh Hunt’s Romantic Paper Gallery: reading Spenser through the Old Masters in 1833 and 1844. La Questione Romantica 5 (1-2), pp. 31-50. ISSN 1125 - 0364.
- Calè, Luisa (2015) ‘A Gallery in the Mind’? Hazlitt, Spenser, and the Old Masters. Tate Papers 24, ISSN 1753-9854.
- Calè, Luisa (2012) Romantic paper arts. European Romantic Review 23 (4), pp. 524-531. ISSN 1050-9585.
- Calè, Luisa (2011) Gray’s ode and Walpole’s China tub: the order of the book and the paper lives of an object. Eighteenth-Century Studies 45 (1), pp. 105-125. ISSN 0013-2586.
- Calè, Luisa and Craciun, A. (2011) The disorder of things. Eighteenth-Century Studies 45 (1), pp. 1-13. ISSN 0013-2586.
- Calè, Luisa (2010) Dickens extra-illustrated: heads and scenes in monthly parts (The Case of Nicholas Nickleby). Yearbook of English Studies 40 (1/2), pp. 8-32. ISSN 0306-2473.
- Calè, Luisa (2007) Sympathy in translation: Paul et Virginie on the London stage. Romanticism On The Net 46, ISSN 1467-1255.
- Calè, Luisa and Di Bello, Patrizia (2007) Introduction: verbal and visual interactions in Nineteenth-Century print culture. 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 5, ISSN 1755-1560.
- Calè, Luisa and Di Bello, Patrizia (2007) Scraps on the album. 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 5, ISSN 1755-1560.
- Calè, Luisa (2006) Periodical personae: pseudonyms, authorship and the imagined community of Joseph Priestley’s Theological Repository. 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 3, ISSN 1755-1560.
- Calè, Luisa (2004) A visual interface for the act of reading. Comparative Critical Studies 1 (1-2), pp. 97-118. ISSN 1744-1854.
Book
- Calè, Luisa and Di Bello, Patrizia, eds. (2010) Illustrations, optics and objects in Nineteenth-Century literary and visual cultures. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave MacMillan. ISBN 9780230221970.
- Braida, A. and Calè, Luisa, eds. (2007) Dante on view: the reception of Dante in the visual and performing arts. Farnham, UK: Ashgate. ISBN 9780754658962.
- Calè, Luisa (2006) Fuseli's Milton Gallery: turning readers into spectators. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780199267385.
Book Review
Book Section
- Calè, Luisa (2023) Spiritual form: Walter Pater's encounters with William Blake. In: Martindale, C. and Prettejohn, E. and Østermark-Johanssen, L. (eds.) Walter Pater and the Beginnings of English Studies. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. pp. 198-215. ISBN 9781108835893.
- Calè, Luisa (2021) On the dynamics of periodical illustration: the 'Cornhill Magazine' from monthly to codex to gallery. In: Beck, A. and Mergenthaler, V. (eds.) Journalähnliche Bücher, buchförmige Journale -- Journal-like Books, Book-shaped Journals. Pfennig-Magazin zur Journalliteratur. Hannover, Germany: Wehrhahn. pp. 121. ISBN 9783865259349.
- Calè, Luisa (2020) Remade. In: Lynch, D. and Gillespie, A. (eds.) The Unfinished Book. Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literature. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780198830801. (In Press)
- Calè, Luisa (2019) Maria Cosway’s Hours: Cosmopolitan and Classical Visual Culture in Thomas Macklin’s Poets Gallery. In: Haywood, I. and Matthews, S. and Shannon, M. (eds.) Romanticism and Illustration. Studies in Romanticism. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. pp. 221-242. ISBN 9781108425711.
- Calè, Luisa (2019) Book illustration. In: Haggarty, S. (ed.) William Blake in Context. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. pp. 56-69. ISBN 9781107144910.
- Calè, Luisa (2018) Bestial metamorphoses: Blake’s variations on trans-human change in Dante’s Hell. In: Bruder, H. and Connolly, T. (eds.) Beastly Blake. Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave. pp. 153-181. ISBN 9783319897875.
- Calè, Luisa (2017) William Blakes Nachtgedanken: Zwischen Buch, Körper, und Cosmos. In: Martin, L. and Brink, C. (eds.) Alles In Allem: Die Gedankenwelt des mystischen Philosophen Jacob Böhme. Dresden, Germany: Sandstein Verlag für Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden. pp. 151-165. ISBN 9783954983339.
- Calè, Luisa (2016) Extra-illustrations: the order of the book and the fantasia of the library. In: Craciun, A. and Schaffer, S. (eds.) The Material Culture of Enlightenment Arts and Sciences. Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment. Romanticism and the Cultures of Print. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 235-254. ISBN 9781137445797.
- Calè, Luisa (2012) Gendering the margins of Gray: William Blake, classical visual culture, and the alternative bodies of Ann Flaxman’s book. In: Bruder, H. and Connolly, T.J. (eds.) Blake, Gender and Culture. The Body, Gender and Culture. London: Pickering and Chatto. pp. 133-143. ISBN 9781848933040.
- Calè, Luisa (2011) The nightmare disseminated: the poetics of the bedroom scene in Fuseli, Frankenstein, Film. In: Thornton, S. and Gillard-Estrada, A.F. (eds.) Circulation and transfer of key scenes in nineteenth-century literature. Cahiers Charles V. Paris, France: Institut d'études anglophones, Université Paris Diderot. pp. 85-106. ISBN 9782902937479.
- Fraser, Hilary (2010) Foreword. In: Calè, Luisa and Di Bello, Patrizia (eds.) Illustrations, Optics and Objects in Nineteenth-Century Literary and Visual Cultures. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave MacMillan. pp. ix-xv. ISBN 9780230221970.
- Tilley, Heather (2010) Wordsworth’s glasses: the materiality of blindness in the romantic imagination. In: Calè, Luisa and Di Bello, Patrizia (eds.) Illustrations, Optics and Objects in Nineteenth-Century Literary and Visual Culture. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 9780230221970.
- Fraser, Hilary (2009) Introduction: Nineteenth-Century objects and beholders. In: Di Bello, Patrizia and Calè, Luisa (eds.) Illustrations, Optics and Objects in Nineteenth-Century Literary and Visual Culture. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. ix-xv. ISBN 9780230221970.
- Mills, Victoria (2009) Dandyism, visuality and the ‘Camp Gem’: collections of jewels in Huysmans and Wilde. In: Calè, Luisa and Di Bello, Patrizia (eds.) Illustrations, Optics and Objects in Nineteenth-Century Visual and Literary Cultures. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave. pp. 147-166. ISBN 9780230221970.
- Calè, Luisa (2009) Belinda and exhibition culture: fiction, pictures and imaginary Ekphrasis. In: Orestano, F. and Frigerio, F. (eds.) Strange Sisters: Literature and Aesthetics in the Nineteenth Century. Cultural Interactions: Studies in the Relationship between the Arts. New York, U.S.: Peter Lang. pp. 13-26. ISBN 9783039118403.
- Calè, Luisa (2008) Blake and the literary galleries. In: Haggarty, S. and Mee, J. (eds.) Blake and Conflict. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 185-209. ISBN 9780230573871.
- Calè, Luisa (2007) From Dante’s Inferno to a TV Dante: Phillips and Greenaway remediating Dante’s Polysemy. In: Braida, A. and Calè, Luisa (eds.) Dante on View: The Reception of Dante in the Visual and Performing Arts. Farnham, UK: Ashgate. pp. 177-192. ISBN 9780754658962.
- Calè, Luisa and Braida, A. (2007) Introduction. In: Braida, A. and Calè, Luisa (eds.) Dante on View: The Reception of Dante in the Visual and Performing Arts. Farnham, UK: Ashgate. pp. 1-16. ISBN 9780754658962.
- Braida, A. and Calè, Luisa (2007) Introduction. In: Braida, A. and Calè, Luisa (eds.) Dante on View: The Reception of Dante in the Visual and Performing Arts. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. pp. 1-13. ISBN 9780754658962.
- Calè, Luisa (2003) Lapland orgies: the hell-hounds round Sin: réécriture et invention dans la galerie miltonienne de J. H. Füssli. In: Bardazzi, G. and Grosrichard, A. (eds.) Dénouement des Lumières et Invention Romantique. Histoire des Idées et Critique Littéraire. Geneva, Switzerland: Drosz. pp. 231-246. ISBN 9782600008372.
- Calè, Luisa The reception of Blake in Italy. In: Paley, M. and Erle, S. (eds.) The Reception of William Blake in Europe. The Reception of British and Irish Authors in Europe. London, UK: Bloomsbury. pp. 125-154. ISBN 9781472507457.
Editorial
- Calè, Luisa and Brooker, Marianne (2020) Introduction: Sibylline Leaves. Studies in Romanticism 49 (1), pp. 1-13. Johns Hopkins University Press. ISSN 0039-3762.
Other
- Calè, Luisa and Parejo Vadillo, Ana Cale, Luisa and Parejo Vadillo, Ana, eds. (2015) The Nineteenth-Century Digital Archive. 2015 (21), London, UK: The Open Library of Humanities.