A Letter from the President

I’d like to take this occasion to highlight some of the wide-ranging activities of K-SAA and to ask again for your support and engaged participation, beginning with renewing your membership and joining us at MLA.  As always, at MLA we will be celebrating outstanding work in our field, with an Essay Prize and Distinguished Scholar Awards at our annual dinner. Please join us in honoring our newest Distinguished Scholars, Alan Bewell and Lisa Vargo, as well as outgoing K-SJ Book Review Editor Beth Dolan and Bibliographer Ben Robertson. There will also be an opportunity at the dinner to introduce new K-SJ Review Editors, Yasmin Solomonescu and Andrew Burkett, along with K- SAA’s new Director of Communication, Anna Mercer. Our two-tier price structure for this dinner is meant to better enable graduate students and contingently-employed faculty to attend. Please alert members of the profession whom you know to qualify for the lower rate and encourage them to attend this important and wonderfully convivial professional occasion.  We will also hope to see you at our two MLA sessions: “Romantics at Two Hundred: 2018 Reads 1818,” and “South Asia and Romanticism,” co-sponsored with the Forum on South Asian and South Asian Diasporic Literatures.  We are now completing the second year of our multiyear “Romantic Bicentennials” initiative, undertaken in partnership with the Byron Society of America. It has so far provided seed funding for 14 events, including a splendid dramatic reading of Byron’s Manfred by the Red Bull Theater and a related symposium last April in New York. There will soon be news about a large event we have seeded on the theme of “Romantic Resistance.” Our 2017 Curran Symposium, “The Emergence of Keats as a Poet,” was brilliantly convened by Susan Wolfson and Kate Singer at Fordham University in October. In May 2018, we are also looking forward to a two-day symposium, “Frankenstein Then and Now, 1818-2018,” convened by Jerrold Hogle and Anne Mellor, to be hosted and sponsored by the Huntington Library. Romantic Bicentennials has also been made possible through the generous support of Liz and George Krupp and the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation. You can find out more about the entire initiative, including how to apply for a seed grant here: http://romantics200.org/.  Last September we publicly launched the website for Frankenreads, our international celebration of the 200th anniversary of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein for Halloween 2018, made possible by a Chairman’s grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. We enthusiastically invite you to join a rapidly growing global community of over 100 institutions in 20 countries who will be participating during Frankenweek, 24-31 October 2018, by planning a full or partial public readathon of the novel, public screening of films, or other Frankenstein programming. We’re excited about the international connections that Frankenreads is helping us to solidify and would be especially grateful to those of you who could help us connect with Romanticists in the global south. You can learn more about Frankenreads, including how to register your event here: http://frankenreads.org/.  We, of course, continue to support early career Romanticists through our Mentoring Project, directed by Stephen Behrendt; our Carl H. Pforzheimer, Jr., Research Grants; and our Bill and  Stuart Buice Fund Bursaries. Our plans for the future include adding to these programs, updating the Keats-Shelley Journal, and further enriching our web and social media presence. We have already made great strides on the latter through the outstanding efforts of our first- ever group of K-SAA Communication Fellows: Ellen Nicholls, Aaron J. Ottinger, Lindsey Seatter, and Christopher Stampone. Their work can be found on our social media accounts and in the News, Notes, Announcements section of the K-SAA website, where they’ve done a series of interviews from our events.  All of these efforts ultimately depend on you, our membership. Please take a moment to renew your membership. We would be especially grateful to any of you who are able to upgrade your membership level to a higher category to help fund this exciting collective work. 

With best wishes, 

Neil Fraistat

President, Keats-Shelley Association of America