A Letter from the President
I hope to see many of you at our upcoming Members meeting, during which we’ll be discussing in detail our activities this year, which include establishing both a physical and digital archive for K-SAA; recognizing and rewarding scholarly excellence in our field; supporting the work of early career and independent scholars; performing a fundamental review of the Keats-Shelley Journal; further developing our Web and social media presence; and increasing our programs and partnerships.
At our MLA dinner, we celebrated new Distinguished Scholars awardees, Pamela Clemit and William Galperin, and we awarded Mark Canuel our annual Essay Prize. We also acknowledged Stuart Curran’s enormous and continued contributions to K-SAA by renaming our annual symposium series after him.
The great generosity of the Acriel Foundation has long enabled us to support the research of early career and independent scholars through annual Pforzheimer Grants, awarded in 2017 to Hrileena Ghosh (Independent Scholar) and Tríona O’Hanlon (Postdoctoral Fellow, Queens University, Belfast). We are also pleased to announce our first class of K-SAA Communication Fellows: Ellen Nicholls (PhD Candidate, University of Sheffield), Aaron Ottinger (Lecturer, University of Washington), Lindsey Seatter (PhD Candidate, University of Victoria) and Christopher Stampone (Postdoctoral Fellow, Southern Methodist University). Together our new Fellows span the U.S., Canada, and the U.K. As a team, they will be spreading the word about our initiatives and helping to foster community among long-standing members, early career scholars, and the wider, engaged public community. You'll be hearing more from and about them soon.
Our “Romantic Bicentennials” initiative, undertaken in partnership with the Byron Society of America, continues in full swing with an upcoming Curran Symposium on “The Emergence of Keats as a Poet,” convened by Susan Wolfson and Kate Singer at Fordham University in October 2017. This symposium is being book-ended by bicentennially-themed sessions at MLA that we are sponsoring this year and in 2018. In May 2018, we are also looking forward to a 2 1/2-day symposium, “Frankenstein Then and Now, 1818-2018,” convened by Jerry Hogle and Anne Mellor, hosted and largely funded by the Huntington Library.
In addition to these symposia, “Romantic Bicentennials” has so far provided seed funding for seven “Networked Events,” both here and in the UK, including (1) a dramatic reading of Byron’s Manfred by the Red Bull Theater from a script by Jerry McGann, in addition to a related symposium convened by Omar Miranda and hosted at NYU this April in New York; (2) “The Shelley Conference 2017” in September at the University of London; and (3) “The Keats Letters Project,” a creative digital project chronicling Keats’s epistolary writing on the 200th year anniversary of each letter. A new cluster of Networked Events on the theme “Romantic Resistance” will soon be announced. You can find out more about Romantic Bicentennials, including how to apply for commemorative event seed-funding here: http://romantics200.org/.
Look forward in the near future to details about our Frankenreads project, to be held on October 31, 2018, which aims to do for Frankenstein what has been done for Joyce’s Ulysses on Bloomsday, involving a global community from the academy, high schools, museums, and libraries. Frankenstein is an extraordinary vehicle for speaking Romanticism to the world. A dedicated Website supporting and coordinating Frankenreads activities will soon be online. By the end of the summer it will provide “Frankenreads in a Box,” with guidance for organizers who would like to stage their own related event. We are delighted to have received a Chairman’s Grant from NEH to support this exciting project and hope that many of you will want to get involved by hosting a public reading of the novel and/or related events.
None of this activity would be possible without your continued support, for which we, as always, are deeply grateful.
With best wishes,
Neil Fraistat
President, Keats-Shelley Association of America