Conferences and Papers
Over the course of her career Dr. Rajan has delivered over 280 academic papers at a variety of locales including the University of Adelaide, University of Alberta, Australian National University, Brock University, Brown University, Bryn Mawr College, California Institute of Technology, University of California-Berkeley, University of California-Los Angeles, University of California-Santa Barbara, University of California-San Diego, University of Cambridge, University of Canterbury (New Zealand), University of Chicago, City University of New York Graduate Centre, Dalhousie University, Delhi University, Duke University, University of Frankfurt, Jadavpur University, Jawaharlal Nehru University, University of London, McMaster University, Unversité de Montréal, Ludwig-Maximilien's Universität Munich, Northern Illinois University, Northwestern University, Ohio State University, Oxford University, Princeton University, Queen's University, University of Saskatchewan, State University of New York at Buffalo, Sussex University, University of Sydney, University of Toronto, Trent University, University of Utah, University of Wales-Cardiff, University of Waterloo, University of Western Australia (Perth), University of Windsor, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Yale University, and the University of Zurich.
Conferences (organized or co-organized)
“The Romantic Life Sciences,” one day pre-conference organized with Dahlia Porter (University of Glasgow), NASSR conference on “Romantic Life,” Ottawa, August 2017.
"Blake and Environments of Disaster and Difference," University of Western Ontario, May 22-23, 2015.
“Romanticism and Knowledge,” joint conference between NASSR and the Gesellschaft für Englische Romantik, Munich, October 2013 (co-organised with Christoph Bode).
“Futures of Schelling,” 2nd conference of the North American Schelling Society. University of Western Ontario, August 2013 (conference committee: Jason Wirth, Seattle University; Sean McGrath, Memorial University).
"(Trans)National Identities: Reimagining Communities," Joint conference between NASSR and the Centre Interdisicplinari de Studii Romantici, Bologna (co-organised with Gregory Kucich, Notre Dame; Diego Saglia, Parma; and Lilla Maria Crisafulli, Bologna).
"Romanticism and History," 10th Annual NASSR Conference, University of Western Ontario, 2002.
"The Histories of Theory," Centre for Theory and Citicism, University of Western Ontario, 1998.
"Romanticism and the Ideologies of Genre," Inaugural NASSR Conference, University of Western Ontario, 1993.
"Contemporary Literary Theory: Philosophical Assumptions and Critical Practice," Queen's University, 1982.
Invited and Plenary Lectures
“John Hunter in a Philosophical Context,” University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, October 2020.
“Schelling, Coleridge and British Idealism,” Department of Philosophy, Jawaharlal Nehru University, October 2017.
“Godwin and the Persistence of Dissensus,” plenary paper for conference on Romanticism and Politics. Gesellschaft für englische Romantik. University of Bamberg, October 2017.
“Disciplining the Life Sciences: The Hunterian Legacy, 1813-61,” Johns Hopkins University, April 2017.
“Immunitary Foreclosures: Schelling and British Idealism,” Schelling’s Afterlives, Oxford University, April 2017.
“The Anthropological Idea: Schelling’s First Outline in his Broader Corpus,” McMaster University, November 2015.
“Unspacing: The Architecture of Poetry in Shelley’s Alastor and Keats’ The Fall of Hyperion,” University of Sydney, August 2015.
“Figures for System in Hegel’s Encyclopedia: The Circle, the Line and the Body,” University of Queensland, July 2015.
“Arranging the Sibylline Leaves of Science: Reading John Hunter from the Romantic to the Victorian Period,” Plenary paper for conference on Re-Reading Romanticism: Imagination, Emotion, Nature and Things, University of Melbourne, July 2015.
“Figures for System in Hegel’s Encyclopedia: The Circle, the Line and the Body,” Harvard University, May 2015.
“The Reality of Nature: From Schelling’s First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature to the Freedom Essay,” Die Positivitat des Wirklichen, Humboldt University-Berlin, October 2014.
“Models for System in Hegel’s Encyclopedia: The Line, The Circle and the Body,” University of Cardiff, June 2014.
“Between Individual and General History: Godwin’s Seventeenth-Century Texts,” Romantic Realignments Series, Oxford University, May 2014.
“Models for System in Hegel’s Encyclopedia: The Line, The Circle and the Body,” Centre for Research in Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, Cambridge, May 2014.
"Smooth and Tangled Systems: Philosophy as Metadiscipline in German Idealism." Romanticism and Knowledge, Joint conference of the GER and NASSR. University of Munich, October 2013. (Plenary)
"Evolution and the Organization of Knowledge: Transferences Between Disciplines in Hegel's and Schelling's Systems." Futures of Schelling. 2nd Conference of the North American Schelling Society. University of Western Ontario, August 2013. (Plenary).
“Idea: The Reality of the Word in Late German Idealism.” The Absolute and the World in Late German Idealism. McGill University August 2013.
"The Institution of Philosophy in Romanticism." Knowledge at the Borders of Disciplinarity. York University, April 2013. (Plenary)
"The Vitality of Idealism: Evolution and Life in Hegel's and Schelling's Systems," Romanticism & Evolution, University of Western Ontario, London, May 12, 2011. (Plenary)
"The Pathology of History: Godwin's Mandeville," Sympathies and Antipathies, Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities, Cambridge University, May 2009.
"The State(s) of Knowledge: Hegel and Schelling," Matters of State: Bildung in Nineteenth Century Intellectual History, Katholike Universitat- Leuven, April 2009. (Plenary)
"Excitability: The (Dis)Organization of Knowledge from Schelling's First Outline (1799) to Ages of the World (1815)," Romanticism and Modernity, 17th annual NASSR conference, Duke University, May 2009.
"The Abyss of the Past: Psychoanalysis in Schelling's Ages of the World," Gesellschaft für Englische Romantik, University of Tübingen, October 2007. (Plenary)
"'Something Not Yet Made Good': Cain, Godwin, Mary Shelley," Byron and Modernity, University of British Columbia, October 2007. (Plenary)
"The Disfiguration of Enlightenment: War, Trauma, and the Historical Novel in Godwin's Mandeville," The Godwinian Moment: Revolutionary Revisions of Enlightenment, Clark Library, University of California-Los Angeles, May 2007.
"The Ends of Art: Hegel's Symbolic Art and Schelling's Historiography in Ages of the World," Inventions of Imagination, University of Washington, May 2007.
"The Ends of Art: Hegel's Symbolic Art and Schelling's Historiography in Ages of the World," session on "Aesthetics and Nation in Romantic Theory and Literature," ACCUTE, University of Saskatchewan, May 2007.
"Perpetual Peace, Absolute War; Godwin's Mandeville," Lines of Amity, Lines of Enmity: War and Peace in the Eighteenth Century, Indiana University, May 2006.
"The Last/Lost Horizon: Encyclopedia and Archive in Foucault's The Order of Things," The Horizon, School of Architecture, Ohio State University, May 2005.
"Speculation, Alchemy, Gambling: Godwin's Critique of Pure Reason in St. Leon," Debatable Lands, British Association of Romantic Studies biennial conference, University of Newcastle, July 2005. (Plenary)
"The Powers of Pathology: Godwin's Mandeville and the End(s) of the Historical Novel," Romantic Deviance, 13th annual NASSR conference, Université de Montreal, August 2005. (Plenary)
"The Deconstruction of Justice: Kant and Godwin," Gesellschaft fár Englische Romantik, University of Munich, October 2005. (Plenary)
"The Prose of the World: Romanticism, the ‘Nineteenth Century,' and the Reorganisation of Knowledge," Cultural studies and the Organization of Knowledge, University of Massachusetts-Boston, February 2005. (Plenary)
"Tarrying With the Negative: Encyclopedics and the (De)construction of Totality in German Idealism," Constructions of Europe, Brock University, March 2005.
"The Encyclopedia and the University: Hegel, Schelling and the Organisation of Knowledge," The Legacies of Theory, University of Alberta, October 2004.
"The Encyclopedia and the University: Hegel, Schelling, and the Organisation of Knowledge," McKay Lecture, Dalhousie University, March 2004
"The Prose of the World: Romanticism, the ‘Nineteenth Century,' and the Reorganisation of Knowledge," Victorian Studies Association of Ontario, April 2002. (Plenary)
"Still (to be) Born: Natural History and the Disfiguration of Reproduction in the 1790s Novel," Evolving Domains of Knowledge and Representation, 10th Annual 18th and 19th Century British Women Writers Conference, University of Wisconsin-Madison, April 2002. (Plenary)
"The Unavowable Community of Idealism: Coleridge and the Life Sciences," Coleridge, Friendship and Modernity, University of Warwick, February 13-14, 2001 (Plenary) [Also presented at conference on "Community and (Im)Possibility," University of Western Ontario, March 23rd-24th 2001].
"The University in Crisis: Cultural Studies, Civil Society, and the Place of Theory," Global Humanities 2000, Dartmouth College, 20-22 October, 2000.
"The Mask of Death: Foucault, The Human Sciences, and Literature," Genealogies, Deconstruction, Rhizomatics, Trent University, May 1999.
"Between History and Romance: Possibility and Contingency in Godwin, Leibniz and Mary Shelley's Valperga," George Whalley Memorial Lecture, Queen's University, February 1998.
"History and Romance in Mary Shelley's Valperga," Mary Shelley in Her Times, Keats-Shelley Association of America, May 1997 [also presented at Romantic Generations, biennial meeting of the British Association of Romantic Studies, Leeds University, July 1997].
"The PostKantian University and the Situation of Theory," Networking the Humanities, Consortium of Humanities Centres and Institutes, University of Illinois-Chicago, October 1996.
"From Restricted to General Economy: A Kantianism Without Reserve," Romantic Crossings, North American Society for the Study of Romanticism, Boston, November 1996. (Plenary)
"Keats, Literature, and ‘the absence of the work'," John Keats Bicentennial Conference, Harvard University, September 1995 [longer version read at University of Ottawa, November 1995; University of Wisconsin, October 1996].
"Dis-Figuring the System: Vision, History and Trauma in Blake's Lambeth Books," William Blake's Illuminated Books: Images and Texts, Huntington Library, October 1994; McMaster University, March 1995; [Comparables, University of Western Ontario, September 1995; University of California-Berkeley, April 1997].
"Autonarration and Genotext in Mary Hays' Memoirs of Emma Courtney," plenary paper, Romanticism and the Ideologies of Genre, University of Western Ontario, Aug. 1993. [also presented as plenary address at Altered States, Lexis Conference, McGill University, Oct. 1993].
"Promethean Narrative: Overdetermined Form in Shelley's Gothic Novels," Shelley Bicentenary Conference, New York, May 1992.
"Coleridge, Wordsworth, and the Textual Abject," Coleridge Summer Conference, July 1992. (Plenary) [also read in the Colloquium Series, University of Western Ontario, 1992]
"Disagreement and Difference; Deconstruction and the Economy of Controversies," The Rhetoric of Controversies, University of Waterloo, May 1990.
"En-Gendering the System: Blake's The Book of Thel and Visions of the Daughters of Albion," Romantic Imagination, Melbourne University, July 1989. (Plenary) [Also read at University of Western Australia, July 1989; Northern Illinois University, October 1989; Delhi University, November 1989; Princeton University, January 1990; Simon Fraser University, April 1990].
"The Figure of Wordsworth in Deconstruction," Romantic Revolutions, Indiana University, March 1988.
"Reading the Secrets of the Political Novel: Godwin and Wollstonecraft," Association of Canadian University Teachers of English, McMaster University, May 1987 (Plenary) [Also read at Bryn Mawr College, February 1988; University of Chicago, April 1989].
"World Within World: Deconstructive Phenomenology and Shelley's Defence of Poetry," English Romanticism: Recent Trends in Criticism, Northwestern University, October 1986 (Plenary) [Also read at Princeton University, 1987.]
"Unsaying his High Language: The Phenomenology of Disarticulation in Shelley," Indeterminacy, University of Western Ontario, November 1984.
"Romanticism and the Death of Lyric Consciousness," Lyric Poetry and the New Criticism, University of Toronto, October 1982.
"Beckett's Early Work: Anti-Romantic or Post-Romantic?" Romantic Ireland, Canadian Association of Irish Studies, University of Western Ontario, March 1980.
Selected Recent Papers at Conferences
“‘The Idea as the Negative of Itself’: The Sciences in Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature,” MLA, Washington D.C., Jan. 2022 (virtual)
“Transgressing the Disciplines: John Hunter (1728-93) and the Threat of the Life Sciences,” Gesellschaft fur Englische Romantik, University of Vechta, Sept. 2019.
“The Form of Naturphilosophie: Schelling’s First Outline,” Romantic Elements, NASSR, University of Chicago/University of Illinois at Chicago, August 2019.
“(Dis)organising Life: Blake, Hegel, and the Trauma of Naturphilosophie,” Science and Literature Studies Association, Toronto, November 2018.
“Schelling, Brown and the Encyclopedization of Medicine,” NASS, University of Hawaii-Hilo, Sept. 2018.
“Mineral, Vegetable, Animal, Human: Blake’s (De)construction of Idealism,” International Gothic Association, Manchester, July 2018.
“Godwin’s Irritability,” Special Session on Godwin, NASSR, Ottawa, August 2017.
“Deconstruction and Institution,” Derrida Today, Concordia University, Montreal, May 22-26 2018.
“Biology and Philosophy: Esposito, Hegel, and Bichat,” Canadian Society for Italian Studies, University of Ottawa, May 2018.
“The Laboratory of Nature: Series and Folds in Schelling’s First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature (1799),” Comparative and Continental Philosophy Circle, Bath Spa University, April 2018.
“Against Institution,” special session on “The Institutions of Theory,” MLA, New York, January 2018.
“The ‘Great Work’ of Science: Organizing John Hunter (1728-93),” Sibylline Leaves, University of London, July 2017.
“Hegel’s Irritability,” special session on “Sciences of the Romantic Text,” American Comparative Literature Association, University of Utrecht, July 2017.
“‘Something Not Yet Made Good’: Trauma and Dissensus in Godwin’s Mandeville,” ACCUTE, Congress, Ryerson University, May 2017.
“Immunitary Foreclosures: Schelling and British Idealism,” Schelling’s Afterlives, Oxford University, April 2017.
“The Great Book: Series and Folds in Schelling’s First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature (1799),” NASS, Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, February 2017.
“Between Philosophical Continents: British Idealism’s Missed Encounter with the Life Sciences in the Work of John Hunter (1728-93),” MLA International Symposium on Other Europes: Migrations, Translations, Transformations, Dusseldorf, June 23-25, 2016.
“Sophia Lee’s The Recess and the Narratology of the Counterfactual” International Society for the Study of Narrative, Amsterdam, June 16-18, 2016.
“The Asystaton of Life: Reading Between British Science and German Philosophy of Nature,” The Heritage and Legacy of Schelling, NASS, Memorial University, September 2015.
“‘Something not yet made good’: The Tropology of the Negative in Godwin’s Mandeville,” Romanticism and Rights, NASSR, Winnipeg, August 2015.
“Arranging the Sibylline Leaves of Science: The 1835 and 1861 editions of the Work of John Hunter (1728-93),” After Print: Manuscripts in the Eighteenth Century, University of California-Santa Barbara, April 2015.
“Unspacing: Shelley’s Alastor and Keats’ The Fall of Hyperion,” MLA, Vancouver, January 2015.
“Disciplining the Life Sciences: The Hunterian Legacy 1813-61,” Classes and Classifications, North American Victorian Studies Association, November 2014.
“The Reality of Nature: From Schelling’s First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature to the Freedom Essay,” Die Positivitat des Wirklichen, Humboldt University-Berlin, October 2014.
“Systems and Autoimmunity: Blake’s Lambeth Books,” Mosaic Conference on Lifedeath, University of Manitoba, October 2014.
“The Anthropological Idea: The (De)construction of Nature in Schelling’s First Outline,” Schelling and the Anthropocene, North American Schelling Society (NASS), Bard College, New York, August 2014.
“Capitalizing Philosophy: The Indiscipline of Hegel’s Encyclopedia,” Capitals, ACLA, New York University, March 2014.
“Models for System: Architectonic, Anatomy, Physiology.” Session on “Romanticism and Systems,” MLA, Chicago, January 2014.
“Idea: The Reality of the Word in Late German Idealism.” The Absolute and the World in Late German Idealism. McGill University August 2013.
“From Theory to Philosophy: The Marginalization of Theory or the Margins of Philosophy?” special session on Theory and Philosophy, North American Society for the Study of Romanticism (NASSR), Boston, August 2013.
“Analeptic Time: Hays, Godwin, and Radical Historiography at the Fin de Siècle,” ACCUTE, University of Victoria, June 2013.
“Blake’s Theatre of Cruelty: The Body Without Organs and the Trauma of System in the Lambeth Books,” American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA), University of Toronto, April 2013.
