Dr. Roman Alexander Barton
Research Associate
Room: R 4006 | KG IV
Office phone number: 203-3314
Email: roman.barton@anglistik.uni-freiburg.de
Roman Alexander Barton studied Cultural Studies, German, English and European Literatures at Humboldt University Berlin and King’s College London. From 2013 to 2016 he worked as a research associate at the CRC 644 “Transformationen der Antike” (Humboldt University Berlin), where he carried out a PhD project on the Making of the Sympathetic Imagination in the British Enlightenment. In 2018, he joined the ERC-funded project LISTLIT: Lists in Literature and Culture (Freiburg University) as a postdoctoral research fellow. He was appointed assistant professor (akademischer Rat a.Z.) at the Chair of Monika Fludernik in 2020. Currently, he investigates the history of the literary list and forms of short drama in the early twentieth century.
Research interests:
- The History of the Literary List
- Modernist Short Drama
- Eighteenth-Century Philosophical Fiction
- The Irish Literary Revival
List of Publications
Monographs
- Literary Lists: A Short History of Form and Function. Palgrave Macmillan, 2023. (co-authored with Eva von Contzen and Anne Rüggemeier)
- The Making of the Sympathetic Imagination: Transformations of Sympathy in British Eighteenth-Century Philosophy and Fiction. De Gruyter, 2020.
Editions
- “Briefwechsel zwischen Jacob Grimm und Georg Waitz.” Briefwechsel der Brüder Jacob und Wilhelm Grimm: Kritische Ausgabe in Einzelbänden, vol. 8, edited by Roman Alexander Barton et al., S. Hirzel, 2022, pp. 557-780. (co-edited with Berthold Friemel)
- Forms of List-Making: Epistemic, Literary, and Visual Enumeration. Palgrave Macmillan, 2022. (co-edited with Julia Böckling, Sarah Link and Anne Rüggemeier)
- Sympathy in Transformation: Dynamics between Rhetorics, Poetics and Ethics. De Gruyter, 2018. (co-edited with Alexander Klaudies and Thomas Micklich)
Articles
- “List-Making as a Spiritual Exercise: On the Functions of Enumeration in the Third Earl of Shaftesbury’s Askêmata.” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, vol. 36, no. 1, 2021, pp. 195-203, DOI: 10.1080/08989575.2020.1815372.
- “‘A fellow-feeling makes one wond’rous kind’: Spectatorial and Narrative Sympathy in Adam Smith, Lord Kames and Oliver Goldsmith.” Sympathy in Transformation: Dynamics between Rhetorics, Poetics and Ethics, edited by Roman Alexander Barton, Alexander Klaudies and Thomas Micklich, De Gruyter, 2018, pp. 177-194.
- “Radicalising Sympathy: William Godwin’s Reading of Shaftesbury.” Shaping Enlightenment Politics: The Social Impact of the First and Third Earls of Shaftesbury, edited by Patrick Müller, Peter Lang, 2018, pp. 275–290.
Conference Papers (selection)
- “What’s in a list?: (Wissens-)Modi der Liste”
Wissensgeschichten – von der Alten Welt bis in die Frühe Neuzeit. Abschlusstagung des SFB 980 Episteme in Bewegung
Berlin | June 2024 - “Enumerative Storytelling and the Modernist Crisis of Narrative”
Annual Conference of the International Society for the Study of Narrative (ISSN)
New Orleans | March 2020 - “Listen ohne Ende. Enumeration und Exzess im britischen Roman des 18. Jahrhunderts”
Aufklärung und Exzess: Epistemologie und Ästhetik des Übermäßigen im 18. Jahrhundert
Freie Universität Berlin | January 2020 - “Recording the Ranks of Life: Hierarchy in the Literary List”
(together with Julia Böckling)
Rankings: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue
Universität Bielefeld | June 2019 - “Endless Lists in Sprawling Narratives: Enumeration in the Sternean Novel”
Conference of the International Society for the Study of Narrative (ISSN)
University of Navarra, Pamplona | May/June 2019 - “Listing towards the Natural Self: On the Functions of Enumeration in Lord Shaftesbury’s Askêmata”
Lists of Life: Life Writing and the Poetics of List Making
FRIAS, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg | January 2019 - “‘A fellow-feeling makes one wond’rous kind’: Sympathetic Reading and Spectating in the later Eighteenth Century”
Poetics of Sympathy Conference
SFB 644 Transformationen der Antike, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin | May 2016 - “‘We feel a gradual dilatation or expansion of the mind’: Configurations of Expansion and the Poetics of Sympathy in Lord Kames’ Elements of Criticism”
(together with Helga Schwalm)
British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (BSECS) 45th Annual Conference: Growth, Expansion and Contraction
St. Hugh’s College, Oxford | January 2016 - “Radicalizing Sympathy: William Godwin’s Reading of Shaftesbury”
(together with Thomas Micklich)
Shaping Enlightenment Politics: The Social and Political Impact of the First and Third Earls of Shaftesbury
St. Giles House | July 2015 - “The Perichoresis of Sympathy and Parental Love: The 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury’s Reading of Seventeenth-Century Divine Literature”
Renaissance Society of America (RSA) Annual Meeting
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin | March 2015 - “Sympathy and the Long Road from Sensus Communis to Common Sense”
(together with Thomas Micklich and Alexander Klaudies)
Center for the Study of Scottish Philosophy (CSSP) Spring Conference
Theological Seminary Princeton | March 2015 - “Transformations of Sympathy: Shaftesbury and Adam Smith between Ancients and Moderns”
(together with Thomas Micklich)
Scottish Seminar in Early Modern Philosophy V
University of Aberdeen | May 2014
Teaching:
Summer term 2024
- Theories and Methods in Literary Studies
- Theories and Methods in Literary Studies (Tutorial)
Winter term 2023/24
- Ü Designing and Implementing Research and Teaching Projects
- PS The Man and the Masks – William Butler Yeats
Summer term 2023
- PS Art for Art’s Sake – Aestheticism in Late Nineteenth-Century Literature
- PS The Drama of Ideas – From Shakespeare to Stoppard
Winter term 2022/23
- PS British Romanticism – The Age of Revolutions
- PS The English Country House in Poetry and Fiction, 1616–1945
Summer term 2022
- VL Introduction to Literary Studies
- PS Knights, Fights, and Fairies. The English Epic Tradition from Spenser to Tolkien
Winter term 2021/22
- VL Introduction to Literary Studies
- PS Twentieth-Century British and Irish Drama. From the Celtic Twilight to Postmodernism
Summer term 2021
- PS The Later Eighteenth Century Novel
- PS The Modernist Storytelling of James Joyce
Winter term 2020/21
- PS Whiners and Tyrants. Eighteenth-Century Philosophical Fiction
- PS Making it New in a Single Act. Modernist Short Drama
Winter term 2019/20
- PS “I will arise and go now” – Art and Agitation in the Irish Revival