Dreaming Romantic Europe

Dreaming Romantic Europe brings together scholars, scholarly associations and museums devoted to the study and presentation of European Romanticisms in an excitingly new, pan-European, cross-disciplinary network.
It will hold three workshops Consuming Romanticism (2018), Romantic Authorship (2019), and Romantic Media (2020) at museums devoted to Romanticism, respectively the Musée de la Vie Romantique in Paris, the Museo Byron in Ravenna, and Dove Cottage in the Lake District. The workshops will explore Romanticism as a consciously trans-European phenomenon. Discussion will be focussed through the identification and consideration of iconic objects that epitomise or construct these aspects of Romanticism.

These objects will be brought together in a major new public-facing collaboration, a plurilingual online museum of European Romanticisms, REVE (Romantic Europe: The Virtual Exhibit). REVE is the core research output of the network's activities. It is its central medium of cultural, intellectual, and creative exchange, collaboration, and experimentation; its principal mechanism for achieving impact both within and beyond academia; and a tangible, extendable project and legacy.

REVE develops new ways of engaging academia, cultural heritage institutions, and the wider public with a new story of European Romanticisms. It aims to
*display c. 100 objects
*bring untouchable, fragile things out of store and up close
*display the otherwise immovable
*bring dispersed things into conjunction for the purposes of mutual illumination
*show items from private collections rarely or never shown to the public
*interpret lost iconic objects
*narrate items in new technological formats
*dramatise exhibits by releasing exhibits on anniversaries
*include new creative responses to Romantic objects

It will serve
1. as a laboratory within which to experiment with the technical and rhetorical possibilities for the digital display of objects and the consequent development of 'best practice' including the possibilities of collaborative virtual exhibition.

2. as a new, accessible, quality assured resource suitable for the study of Romanticisms at school and university level across European institutions, making important innovations and interventions in pedagogical practice.

3. as a means of engaging museum-going and non-museum-going publics across Europe, building a sense of a wider European literary heritage, and encouraging further imaginary and actual touristic adventures.

In sum, our intellectual aims are to retrieve, revalue and re-present long-neglected transnational aspects of European Romanticisms as they emerged over the long nineteenth century. Through promoting conversation between very different traditions and institutions, we expect to stretch thinking about how best to think about, teach, and present European Romanticisms in the twenty-first century.

The practical strategy underpinning this aim is to develop new pan-European professional and collaborative connections between academics and leading heritage organizations devoted to Romanticism. We expect in turn to produce the exchange of knowledge and ideas across national, linguistic, disciplinary, institutional and sectoral borders, and practical innovation and creative experimentation bearing on the futures of digital museum display and virtual visitor experience.

Beyond the academic world, Dreaming Romantic Europe and REVE are designed to reach and to benefit four constituencies:
1. Participating cultural heritage organizations concerned with conserving and presenting Romanticisms across Europe

2. Other cultural heritage organizations concerned with conserving and presenting Romanticisms across Europe

3. The museum-going public

4. School pupils (16+)

1/2. Participating and other cultural heritage organizations
Project workshops will enable extensive collaboration and knowledge exchange between academics and participating cultural heritage organizations. Specifically, we anticipate that heritage organizations will be enabled through participation
a. to access and exploit specialised academic research more readily, and design further and more effective collaborations with scholarly associations
b. to develop a new and cost-effective way in REVE of accessing much larger publics
The benefits of using and engaging with REVE itself as the project's core research output will stretch well beyond the initial network. We intend to invite organizations not as yet represented within the network to showcase items from their own collections within REVE once it is developed. We thus anticipate progressively changing and improving current curatorial practice in museums through engaging a wide variety of museums with the cutting-edge, pan-European, cross-sectoral, and collaborative research model realised in REVE.

3. The museum-going public
Museum-goers will gain access to many items hitherto invisible or out of reach, and to many museums of which they have been unaware through the accessible and highly-condensed narratives provided by REVE. This will change public understanding of Romanticism, developing a sense of an interconnected Romantic Europe and its continued vitality.

4, School pupils (16+):
A substantial number of individual entries within REVE will be designed to illuminate texts and topics often taught at 16+, with a view to changing the ways in which students understand and engage with Romanticism as a European phenomenon. REVE, as a new sort of short-form museum available at the click of an exploratory mouse, allows for new and convenient ways of social digital engagement, providing a virtual means of encouraging, changing and amplifying the ways that the young can engage with curated objects from any location.