Please consider submitting a short (250 word) proposal for this guaranteed panel sponsored by the Robert Graves Society.

In “Narrating the Past,” British historian Alun Munslow defines “history as a ‘literature of fact’” (23), “an aesthetic undertaking” (17), and a “storied form of knowledge” (17). Continuing the conversations related to “Times and Places,” to be held at the 17th International Robert Graves Conference in Palma, Mallorca, Spain (July 2026), this panel deliberates Graves’s and his literary associates’ historical, geographic, and historiographic legacies. 

Papers might examine significant locations and periods in Graves’s life: the Somme in 1916, Mallorca in 1929, Devon in the 1940s, Mexico in 1968, or the importance of Wimbledon, Harlech, Oxford, both as formative experience and subject matter.

There may be a focus on time, place and their interrelation in his imaginative and other writing: whether Claudius’s Rome (in this, the 50th anniversary of I, Claudius, the famous BBC TV adaptation of Graves’s historical fiction), the extensive mythical vistas of The White Goddess, or in any other aspect of his life and work.

Additional topics might consider:

Graves and the significance of specific locations and/or times

The interrelation of history and geography in Graves’s work and life

Correspondences between times and places evoked poetically, fictionally, autobiographically

The intersections of time and place

Graves and the transhistorical and/or universal (or their opposite)

Graves and culture rhymes

Time passing, arrested, or reversed

Graves and memory

Graves and personal history

People-in-Place

Graves and mobility: exile, travel, displacement, belonging

Graves and landscape / ecology

Places, times, people

Graves and the history of language

Deadline for submissions: April 1

 For more information, contact Anett Jessop (ajessop@uttyler.edu) or Michael Joseph (mjoseph@emeritus.rutgers.edu)