Arts and Humanities at Western

Join our team! We're currently recruiting for an Employer Relationship Specialist to support our Arts and Humanities Internship Program (AHIP). Check out the Working at Western website (recruit.uwo.ca) posting 42866. Closing date of May 5, 2026.

🐝 Join us for Nathan TeBokkel's Woodman Lecture, "What Is It Like to Be a Bee? Phenomenology and Romantic Forms of Estrangement," on May 21 at 4PM in Conron Hall. Register here: https://www.uwo.ca/events/2026/05/woodman-tebokkel.html

In 1974, philosopher Thomas Nagel transformed phenomenology with his landmark essay, "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" In this lecture, TeBokkel reimagines that question by replacing "bat" with "bee," shifting phenomenological inquiry into the intertwined histories of labour, environment, agriculture and romantic poetry. TeBokkel draws on his lived experience as a beekeeper, managing hives in a world where insect pollination supports roughly one-third of global food crops. The result is a compelling reflection on how the humanities respond to economic and environmental crises.

Nathan TeBokkel is a Banting postdoctoral fellow at Western and a recipient of the Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship and the Killam Memorial Doctoral Scholarship. His upcoming book, Whistling at the Plough, examines the relationship between agricultural capitalism and romanticism. His current Banting project, Working Feeling, explores labour history, lived experience and romantic poetics.

In addition to his academic work, TeBokkel is training as a master beekeeper on his family farm and researches honeybee queen replacement as a method to improve overwinter survival. His recent publications include essays in New Literary History and The Alchemy of Stories.

The Ross and Marion Woodman Speaker Series in Romanticism features enagaging lectures that will showcase the movement's enduring power in the belief that human emotion, creativity and connection to nature are essential to understanding our world. 🐝

'O Sorrow, wilt thou live with me': Join us this week for "Tennyson's Errors," a lecture by English Professor Matthew Rowlinson, on April 16th from 4-5 PM in Conron Hall (University College Room 3110, reception to follow). This lecture is part of the Ross and Marion Woodman Speaker Series in Romanticism. Register here: https://www.uwo.ca/events/2026/04/woodman-rowlinson.html

This paper explores how errors of date, address, and occasion haunt Tennyson’s poetry. Tennyson’s great elegy "In Memoriam" can be understood as a rectification of error, but even in "In Memoriam," some errors and contingencies prove hard to dispel. And they persist in other poems, like the late “In the Valley of Cauteretz,” where a mistake in the year reveals a q***r, melancholy ambivalence to the commemorative and anniversary modes as such.

In his teaching and research, Dr. Matthew Rowlinson studies nineteenth-century British literature and culture. He has particular interests in the writings of George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Alfred Tennyson, John Keats, and Walter Scott. His work aims to understand the way literature describes or resists the material, embodied world in which it is made. His most recent book is Biopolitics and Animal Species in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Science (Cambridge University Press); current research focuses on literary allegory as a form of anachronism.

The Ross and Marion Woodman Speaker Series in Romanticism invites intellectual exploration of this movement's powerful legacy to the Humanities and beyond. Romanticism continues to cast a long shadow on our experience, especially our present time of various crises that require Romanticism's ceaseless mental flight more than ever.