Encountering Malta II : British writers and the Mediterranean 1760 - 1840 : literature, landscapes, politics : conference review

Abstract

In January 2014, the Department of English at the University of Malta held the second in a series of conferences, entitled ‘Encountering Malta II – British Writers and the Mediterranean 1760-1840: Literature, Landscapes, Politics’. The first, held in 2011 in conjunction with the School of English at the University of St Andrew’s, Scotland, grounded itself within the same eighty year span, and had featured keynote speakers Professor Peter Vassallo and Professor Michael O’Neill. This series was inspired, in part, by the book Encounters with Malta—a work that details the interaction of various artistic figures with the Maltese archipelago over the centuries, as Dr Petra Caruana Dingli, one of the co-editors of the work, pointed out in the roundtable discussion on the first day of the event. This second two-day conference took place at the Old University Building in Valletta, Malta. It was a moderately paced event with a comfortable schedule that allowed for two keynote speakers and an intriguing variety of papers which attested to the tumultuous richness of the late 18th and early 19th century period in question.