Author Andrea Wulf will be talking about the young Romantics who incited a revolution of the mind that shaped our modern world.

T his is hybrid meeting - please do choose your ticket carefully.

From the author of The Invention of Nature comes an exhilarating story about a remarkable group of thinkers, poets and philosophers who changed the way we think about ourselves and the world. 

They came together in Jena, a quiet German university town and this brilliant circle included the famous poets Goethe, Schiller, and Novalis; the visionary philosophers Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel; the contentious Schlegel brothers; Alexander von Humboldt and the formidable Caroline Schlegel. 

Their collaboration launched Romanticism on to the world stage, inspiring some of the greatest poets, novelists and thinkers across the world. Their emphasis on individual experience, their description of nature as a living organism, and their insistence of the unity of humankind and nature, informed the writings of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson amongst many others. The French revolutionaries may have changed the political landscape, but these young Romantics incited a revolution of the mind that shaped our modern world. 

 Andrea Wulf is an award-winning author of several books. Her book New York Times bestseller The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World is published in 27 languages and won fifteen international literary awards, including the Royal Society Science Book Prize 2016. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the Linnean Society and PEN American Center.