Please join us as we hear from Professor Claudia Capancioni.

Today the legacy of Alfred Lord Tennyson is mostly associated to his role as the Poet Laureate who, from 1850 to his death in 1892, marked historical moments of Queen Victorian’s reign with poems such as ‘Ode on the dearth of the Duke of Wellington’ (1852) and the ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’ (1854). This talk reexamines Tennyson’s poetry and life by focusing on the connections between his work and Lincolnshire, the county of his childhood and youth. Since his initial experiments, Lincolnshire’s landscape and soundscapes were influential to his poetry. Seeking creative solitude in the natural environment of Somersby and Mablethorpe, for example, he found ways to convey emotions, thoughts, and feelings through verses that connect the human and the natural worlds, the local and the global, the present to the past and future of our planet earth. In Lincolnshire’s ecosystems, he found those solitary moments to pursue his poetic imagination and inventiveness that remained key throughout his career. This talk reconnects Tennyson to his county of birth and shows how his poems express his unwavering trust in the value of poetry as a means of knowing and understanding the infinite complex entangles of our life with that our planet.

Biography

Prof. Claudia Capancioni, SFHEA, Dott. (Urbino, Italy), MA (Hull), PhD (Hull)

Claudia Capancioni is Professor of English Literature at Lincoln Bishop University (UK), where she leads the English Department and the Research and Knowledge Exchange Unit, ‘Re-presenting the Past: Cultures, Narratives, Legacies’. She specialises in Victorian and contemporary British literature, life, travel, and women’s writing, and gender studies. Her most recent publications include articles and chapters on Sarah Austin (2025, 2022), Lucie Duff Gordon (2022, 2021), Ali Smith (2024), Tennyson (2024) and Margaret Collier (2024, 2021). She has been working on the creative arts and solitude in the nineteenth century and a volume that reassesses and revitalises the gendered and gendering debates associated with the nineteenth-century ‘Easts’ entitled Re-examining Nineteenth-Century Easts: Gendered Narratives of Encounter with Mariaconcetta Costantini and Julia Kuehn (Manchester University Press, forthcoming 21 April 2026). Claudia is the Deputy Chair of the Executive Committee of the Tennyson Society and serves on the editorial board of The Tennyson Research Bulletin.

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