We are happy to welcome two new temporary members of staff, Dr Niklas Fischer and Anne-Claire Michoux, who will be teaching courses on contemporary literature and Romanticism this semester. Niklas Fischer, who was a student at Fribourg University before doing his PhD at the University of Sydney with a thesis on E. M. Forster, will be teaching an MA seminar on "The Contemporary Novel", covering recent novels by Olivia Laing, Moshin Hamid, Anna Burns, and Ali Smith, alongside a number of theoretical texts concerned with the idea of the contemporary and its various reading practices. Anne-Clair Michoux gained her M.Litt at Oxford and will be submitting her PhD thesis on women's writing of the Romantic period at the University of Neuchâtel this year. She will be teaching a BA seminar on "Spectacular Romanticism", looking at the culture of spectacle in the Romantic period in a wide range of genres as well as visual culture.