The Arts and Humanities Research Council has awarded a network grant to ‘Dreaming Romantic Europe’, a project led by Catriona Seth, the Marshal Foch Professor of French Literature here at Oxford, as co-investigator, and by Professor Nicola J. Watson of the Open University as Principal Investigator. The award will make it possible to draw together individual academics, but also scholarly associations and cultural heritage institutions across Europe, which are devoted to the study and presentation of Romanticism.

Over the next three years, the network will run three workshops at museum venues across Europe: ‘Consuming Romanticism’ (2018), ‘Romantic Authorship’ (2019), and ‘Romantic Media’ (2020), which together aim to recover Romanticism as a consciously trans-European phenomenon. The workshops will examine foundational Romantic ideas of cultural consumption, authorship, and medium through exploring and describing how these ideas were expressed through trans-European ‘objects’, including buildings, landscapes and artefacts.

The online exhibition, RÊVE, will organise, curate, and make 100 of these objects publicly accessible, so developing new ways of engaging academia, cultural heritage institutions, and the wider public with a new story of European Romanticisms. The first exhibits can be viewed online here: http://www.euromanticism.org/virtual-exhibition.

The header image is a detail of In Remembrance of Johann Emanuel Bermer by Caspar David Friedrich (1817). © Wikimedia Commons / Artist: Caspar David Friedrich. See here for the full image.