In Memoriam: Stuart Curran, 1940-2024
The Keats-Shelley Association of America commemorates the life of Stuart Curran, a groundbreaking scholar of Romanticism, previous editor of the Keats-Shelley Journal, and former president of the K-SAA.
Stuart Curran
August 3, 1940 – October 7, 2024
The Keats-Shelley Association of America commemorates the life of Stuart Curran, a groundbreaking scholar of Romanticism, previous editor of the Keats-Shelley Journal, and former president of the K-SAA. The annual Curran Symposia were named in his honor.
From 1974 to his retirement in 2012, he was the Vartan Gregorian Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania where he taught courses in 18th- and 19th-century British literature and chaired over two dozen doctoral dissertations. In 2004, he received the Provost’s Award for Outstanding Mentorship of Ph.D. Students, and in 2008 he won the David Delaura Teaching Award, Sponsored by the English Undergraduate Advisory Board. He mentored and supported countless scholars over the years.
His books include Poetic Form and British Romanticism (Oxford, 1986), Shelley’s Annus Mirabilis: The Maturing of an Epic Vision (Huntington Library, 1975), Shelley’s Cenci: Scorpions Ringed with Fire (Princeton, 1970). Among his edited collections are The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism (Cambridge, 2010), Mary Shelley in Her Times, edited with Betty T. Bennett (Johns Hopkins, 2000), Shelley: Poet and Legislator of the World (Johns Hopkins, 1996) with Betty T. Bennett, Blake’s Sublime Allegory: Essays on the Four Zoas, Milton, Jerusalem with Joseph Anthony Wittreich, Jr. (Wisconsin, 1973). He was integral to bringing Romantic women writers back into the spotlight, contributing to the 1740–1830 section of The Brown University Women Writers Project. His textual editing encompasses volumes of Mary Shelley’s Valperga (Oxford, 1997), The Poems of Charlotte Smith (Oxford, 1993), and Le Bossu and Voltaire on the Epic (Scholars Facsimilies and Reprints, 1970). For Romantic Circles, he compiled an annotated hypertext edition of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (both the 1818 and 1831 texts). He also created a 14-volume edition of The Works of Charlotte Smith and co-edited four volumes of Johns Hopkins University’s The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley. His accomplishments and contributions to the study of Romanticism are too tremendous to be fully listed here.
He is survived by his husband, Joseph Wittreich.
Thursday’s Redbull performance of Sardanapalus was dedicated to Stuart with a beautiful remembrance by Michael Gamer, as was the following day’s Curran Symposium. We are planning an issue of the Keats-Shelley Journal as well as roundtables at NASSR and BARS celebrating his work. We have also been collecting many remembrances from colleagues and students to read at the MLA Awards Dinner. If you would like to add something short or long, please feel free to write directly to our President, Kate Singer.
The University of Pennsylvania will be hosting a memorial service for Stuart Curran on Saturday, April 26, 2025, in Van Pelt Library. Details for the afternoon service and reception will be forthcoming.
Read the obituary from the New York Times here.
