About BADS

The British Association of Decadence Studies (BADS) is an international scholarly association that brings together academics and practitioners in order to explore the field of decadence in the broadest sense, from the perspective of various cultures and multiple disciplines, from antiquity to the present day, including written, visual, performative, and audible texts, in English and in other languages. BADS is based in the UK, but its aims and outlook are transnational, transcultural, and inclusive, and our events are open to all.

MEMBERSHIP

BADS Membership entitles you to:

• early-bird discounts for BADS events

• reduced fees for BADS conferences, workshops and events

• entry to the annual essay prize

• digital delivery of the newsletter

Download BADS Constitution (PDF)

Newsletter

Please email newsletter items to the Newsletter Editor Sally Blackburn-Daniels: s.blackburn-daniels@tees.ac.uk.

AGM

The next AGM will be held in Summer 2024. Please email bads@gold.ac.uk for more details.

Membership

Membership is now free of charge!

Please sign up via the below form to become a BADS Member. 

Please consider donating to BADS to help keep our events running.

The BADS Executive Committee

Chair: Jane Desmarais (Goldsmiths)

Jane Desmarais is Professor of English and Director of the Decadence Research Centre in the Department of English and Creative Writing at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her monograph, Monsters under Glass: A Cultural History of Hothouse Flowers, 1850 to the Present, was published by Reaktion Books in 2018. She has written numerous essays on the theme of decadence and has co-edited several works, including Decadence: An Annotated Anthology (with Chris Baldick, Manchester University Press, 2012), Arthur Symons: Selected Early Poems (with Chris Baldick, MHRA, 2017), Decadence and the Senses (with Alice Condé, 2017), Decadence and Literature (with David Weir, Cambridge University Press, 2019), the Oxford Handbook of Decadence (with David Weir, Oxford University Press, 2021), and Decadent Plays, 1890-1930 with Adam Alston (forthcoming with Bloomsbury in 2023).

Vice Chair: Matthew Creasy (Glasgow University)

Matthew Creasy is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Glasgow. He is leading the Royal Society of Edinburgh Workshop ‘Scottish Cosmopolitanism at the Fin de Siècle’, and his critical edition of Arthur Symons’s The Symbolist Movement in Literature was published by Fyfield-Carcanet during 2014. He has published essays and articles on the work of James Joyce, William Empson, Arthur Symons and decadence. He is currently editing Confessions of a Young Man by George Moore for the MHRA-imprint ‘Jewelled Tortoise’.

Secretary: Alice Condé (Goldsmiths)

Alice Condé is a lecturer in the Department of English and Creative Writing at Goldsmiths, University of London. She is co-editor of Decadence and the Senses (with Jane Desmarais, Legenda, 2017) and co-editor of In Cynara’s Shadow: Collected Essays on Ernest Dowson (with Jessica Gossling). Her essay on ‘Decadence and Popular Culture’ can be found in Jane Desmarais and David Weir’s volume on Decadence for the Cambridge Critical Concepts series. 

Treasurer: Jessica Gossling (Goldsmiths)

Jessica Gossling is a lecturer in the Department of English and Creative Writing at Goldsmiths, University of London, and Deputy Managing Editor of The Literary Encyclopedia. Her current research focuses on the decadent threshold poetics of Charles Baudelaire, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Arthur Symons, and Ernest Dowson. She is co-editor of In Cynara’s Shadow: Collected Essays on Ernest Dowson (with Alice Condé, 2019). Her most recent essay, on ‘Decadent Interior Decorating’, is published in the Oxford Handbook of Decadence. Alice and Jessica are the webmistresses of volupte.gold.ac.uk.

NEWSLETTER EDITOR: Sally Blackburn-Daniels (TEESSIDE University)

Sally Blackburn-Daniels is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Culture and Creativity, Teesside University. Sally’s research focuses on the late nineteenth and early twentieth century networks surrounding the writer Vernon Lee. Sally’s article ‘From Crystal Palace to the Grand Guignol: Vernon Lee and the First World War’ is part of a special issue of Volupte on Vernon Lee co-edited by Sally and Patricia Pulham. Sally is co-organising ‘The Future of Intelligence: A Multidisciplinary Vernon Lee Conference’ in 2023 with colleagues from the Associazione Culturale Il Palmerino and the International Vernon Lee Society.

Social media officer: Eleanor Keane (GoLDSMITHS)

Eleanor Keane is a PhD student at Goldsmiths,University of London. Her PhD thesis will examine fin-de-siècle fairy tales as examples of queer decadent narratives, and her research interests focus on literary decadence and the visual arts, and expressions of gender, decadence, and sexuality within the late nineteenth century. Eleanor graduated from Goldsmiths in 2019 with an MA in Literary Studies, and her dissertation explored sexuality, consumption, and the image of the decadent ‘she-wolf’ within the work of the fin-de-siècle writers Renée Vivien and Rachilde.

Social media officer: Joseph Thorne (Liverpool John Moores University)

Joseph Thorne, having studied for his undergraduate degree at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and his Masters at Cardiff University, completed his PhD at Liverpool John Moores University in 2019. His work looks at the material interactions of decadent social networks at the Fin de Siècle. In 2016, he worked as a research assistant for the Liverpool Central Library exhibition Richard Le Gallienne: Liverpool’s Wild(e) Poet, curated by Professor Margaret Stetz and Mark Samuels Lasner (University of Delaware). In 2019, he co-organized an international conference, Neo-Victorian Decadences, held at St Johns’ College, Durham.

Student Member: tereza brala (University of Trier)

Tereza Brala has a Bachelor of Education and a Bachelor of Arts in English Studies, Philosophy and Education from the University of Trier, Germany, where she is finishing her Master of Education. She spent a year abroad studying English at Homerton College, Cambridge. Tereza has presented, and is set to present, papers on fin-de-siècle poetry at international conferences and is currently preparing articles on concepts of selfhood and consciousness in late Victorian and modernist lyric, a topic which her future PhD will examine in more depth.

student member: Conner moore (Miami university)

Conner Moore is an MA student in the English literature programme at Miami University, having completed his undergraduate studies at The Ohio State University at Newark in 2019. He is currently working on his thesis exploring the philosophy of antinatalism, a moral rejection of human procreation, as it manifests in a variety of decadent texts, giving shape to and being shaped by the plentiful representations of sexual dissidence in the works of such writers as Baudelaire, Swinburne, and Rachilde. He will be giving a talk at the 30th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf in 2021 exploring Woolf’s relationship to the decadent movement titled ‘Nothing is Forbidden: Decadence and Virginia Woolf.’

Ordinary Member: Robert Pruett (Oxford University)

Robert Pruett-Vergara is currently preparing a monograph of his thesis, Remy de Gourmont and the Crisis of Erotic Idealism, and his work investigates the interplay of erotic and philosophical discourses at the transition from Symbolism to modernism. Alongside the Cercle des Amateurs de Remy de Gourmont (CARGO), he co-organized the Fin de Siècle Symposium (Balliol College, Oxford, 2016) which featured his essay on ‘The Concept of Chastity in Remy de Gourmont’s Theory of Art and Mind’. Outside of Oxford, Robert has given talks at the Musée Gustave Moreau in Paris and is the current reviews editor of Volupté: Interdisciplinary Journal of Decadence Studies.