As Romanticism @ OSU sends its panel to ICR 2014, we’re excited to announce that we’ll be hosting a loose reading group for Thomas Pfau’s magnum opus Minding the Modern: Human Agency, Intellectual Traditions, and Responsible Knowledge (2013). We’ll first meet, having read Pfau’s brief exordium, to discuss how we’d like to proceed as a group. As some of us already imagine, we’ll build a wish list of particular chapters we’d like to talk about. Minding the Modern is a tome, and we’ll try to take it nice and easy over the academic year.

So far, the response has been enthusiastic, and I for one am glad to be talking about how we might raise the stakes of placing Romanticism (which functions as a critical moment in Pfau’s narrative) in much larger histories that tangle with the most difficult questions about the human experience.