Highlights from SAMLA

This November, the K-SAA supported a session at the South Atlantic Modern Language Association's Conference, entitled: 'Romanticism and Popular Culture'. Session organizer, Ben Robertson, fills us in on how the session went.

The Keats-Shelley Association of America sponsored an affiliated session for the fifth consecutive year at the 89th annual conference of the South Atlantic Modern Language Association (SAMLA). Held November 3-5 in Atlanta, Georgia  this year’s conference theme was “High Art/Low Art: Borders and Boundaries in Popular Culture.” The K-SAA session, entitled “Romanticism and Popular Culture,” was held Friday, 3 November, in the late afternoon. Panelists included Arif Camoglu, Jamie Watson, and Tina Iemma. Camoglu, a Phd candidate at Northwestern University, presented “The Ends of Self-Conscious Orientalism in Percy Bysshe Shelley”; Watson, a Phd student at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, presented “Robes of Rhetoric: Elizabeth’s Navigation of Letter-Writing Discourses in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; and Iemma, a doctoral fellow at  St. John’s University, presented “Keats, Hazlitt, and Political Identity.” The session attracted many guests and sparked interesting discussions and questions afterward. Iemma and Watson kindly agreed to co-organize next year’s session, and Camoglu volunteered to serve as secretary.  The next SAMLA convention will be held November 2-4, 2018 in Birmingham, Alabama, and the conference theme, which is especially germane to Romantic-era writing, will be “Fighters from the Margins: Socio-Political Activists and Their Allies.”