Alan Bewell of the Department of English has been honoured with the 2017 Keats-Shelley Association of America (K-SAA) Distinguished Scholar Award which recognizes career-long excellence in scholarship devoted to the second generation of British Romantic writers and the culture in which they lived.
“It’s an award for lifetime achievement,” says Bewell. “And the fact that I am being seen among scholars and critics of such a great calibre is a wonderful feeling.”
A scholar of British Romanticism, Bewell focuses on three major areas: the relationship between literature, medicine, and science; the history of colonialism; and environmental history.
Much of Bewell’s recent work has focused on the ways in which the global ecological impact of British colonialism is expressed in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature. His recent book, Natures in Translation: Romanticism and Colonial Natural History, seeks to counter the conventional view that Romantic nature writing reflected a turning away from change and the recognition of social and political realities.
Bewell says when you study writing during the British Romantic period, it can be clearly seen that rather than being separate from history, “nature was its primary arena: it embodied the struggle between Europeans and Indigenous people to control the natures around them.”
“Europeans desired to replace the natures that were already there. The capacity to change, transform, and direct the movement of natures everywhere was at the heart of colonial struggle. New natures were coming into being and old natures were being destroyed,” says Bewell.
“So, the idea that the nature is fixed is not true. Natures everywhere were going through radical transformations. Shifting methodologically to understanding natures as being themselves shaped by history, place and people allows me to recognize the historical and geographical dimension of natures. Romantic literature documents the struggle between peoples in the face of new natures coming into being and others being forced out of existence.”
After eight years as an academic administrator, Bewell – who served as chair of the Department of English from 2008 – 2016 — has enthusiastically returned to his research and teaching. His advice to students pursuing a degree in English: “If you love literature, then follow where your heart is.”
Bewell is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a recipient of the Northrop Frye Award, an honour recognizes outstanding teaching that succeeds in conveying the importance — and excitement — of research to students at the University of Toronto. His essay, “Keats’s ‘Realm of Flora,’” received the Keats-Shelley Association Essay Prize in 1992.
The K-SAA is a nonprofit organization devoted to the study of the second generation of Romantic poets, namely John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and their immediate circles.