K-SAA at MLA 2021 - “Public Romanticisms” and the Annual Awards
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On Saturday January 9 2021, the K-SAA held a virtual gathering during the same week as the MLA convention. Although we were disappointed not to be able to meet and celebrate the K-SAA award winners in person (as is the usual practice!), this convivial event was still an important and joyous occasion - and we were delighted to be joined by scholars, students and lovers of Romanticism from around the world. We were so pleased to see 75 friends of the K-SAA online via Zoom.
The main aim of the event was to honor the K-SAA 2020 Distinguished Scholars Angela Esterhammer and Orrin N. C. Wang, along with the winners of the 2020 Essay Prize and the Pforzheimer Research Grants. The event followed the success of the K-SAA sponsored panel at MLA 2021, “Public Romanticisms,” which you can read more about here.
Today on the Blog we are pleased to share with you the slideshows of toasts in honor of the Distinguished Scholars for you to enjoy in your own time, and we congratulate the other prize winners once again. Look out for their future work!
Click here to read a message from the K-SAA President Neil Fraistat, explaining all the K-SAA initiatives in 2020-21, including the 2020 volume of the Keats-Shelley Journal and its special feature on “50 Voices”, our anti-racism roundtable, our ongoing support for early career scholars, our strategic plan, our K-SAA Blog, and our continued social media outreach.
Congratulations to Distinguished Scholar Angela Esterhammer
The award was presented with an encomium by Ian Duncan. This speech will soon be published by the K-SAA.
Professor Angela Esterhammer (Victoria College, University of Toronto) is the author or editor of 15 books and over 80 articles in the field of British, German and European Romanticism and 19th-century culture, focusing primarily on performativity and performance. Her current research concerns experimental uses of textual, visual, and performative media during the 1820s and investigates the era's preoccupation with personal identity, celebrity, anonymity and pseudonymity.
Congratulations to Distinguished Scholar Orrin N. C. Wang
The award was presented with an encomium by Kate Singer. This speech will soon be published by the K-SAA.
Professor Orrin Wang (University of Maryland) specializes in the study of both Romanticism and theory and is especially interested in how the two discourses converge. How that convergence speaks to the question of modernity is the focus of his first book, Fantastic Modernity: Dialectical Readings in Romanticism and Theory (Johns Hopkins UP, 1996). How that convergence is further expressed in Romantic and post-Romantic narratives of sensation and sobriety is the subject of his Romantic Sobriety: Sensation, Revolution, Commodification, History (Johns Hopkins UP, 2011), the winner of the 2011 Jean-Pierre Barricelli Prize. Wang has written on such figures as P.B. Shelley, Wordsworth, Keats, Wollstonecraft, Dacre, Kant, Derrida, and Zizek and also teaches and studies the gothic. His new project involves the possibility of non-dialectical forms of media in Romantic and post-Romantic writing—of the concept of media without the idea of mediation.
Congratulations to the winner of the 2020 K-SAA Essay Prize Jessica Roberson
Dr Jessica Roberson is an Assistant Professor (CLT) in English at Mount Saint Mary’s University in Los Angeles, specializing in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature (especially Romanticism), with an emphasis on book history, the history of science, disability studies and maker culture. Jessica teaches British literature after 1700 as well as critical theory and a variety of genre courses, and is interested in discussions of pedagogy, making, and disability activism, particularly surrounding chronic illness.
With an honorable mention to Mina Gorji
Dr Mina Gorji (Pembroke College, University of Cambridge) researches literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, especially poetry, and has an abiding interest in the poetry of John Clare. Mina's current project is a study of Romantic Listening, an exploration of the forms and significance of listening in Romantic-period poetry. Her other interests include literary language, environmental poetics, working-class poetry, literature and popular culture, materiality and sound, shorter lyric forms (including nursery rhyme) and the writings of Christina Rossetti. Mina is also a practicing poet with an interest in contemporary poetry—her first collection, "The Art of Escape", will be published by Carcanet in 2020.
Congratulations to our Pforzheimer Grant winners
Dr Bysshe Coffey is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at Newcastle University. His British Academy research project examines the phenomenon of 'High Shelleyanism', and the differing ideologies and methodologies of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s numerous editors, amateur and professional. It charts the diffusion of Shelley’s works through cheap reprints, illustration, music and networks of influence. Bysshe is constructing an annotated digital gallery of illustrated editions of Shelley, visual representations of the poet, and musical settings of his verse between the years 1851-1922. The website, which is in its initial stages, will go live in 2021.
Dr Leila Walker (CUNY, Queen's College) is an Emerging Technologies and Digital Scholarship Librarian. Leila oversees the creation and development of resources to support digital scholarship at Queens College, and invites partnership with faculty, staff, and students on their digital projects. Leila earned a PhD in British romantic literature at the CUNY Graduate Center. Prior to joining the Queens College Library faculty, Leila taught in the English department and served as the Research Associate for Shelley and his Circle, a multi-volume scholarly publication of manuscript materials held in the Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle. Leila's research interests include the digital humanities, British romantic literature, pedagogy, scholarly editing, and the history of the book. Congratulations once again to our Distinguished Scholars and prize winners. We look forward to hopefully convening in person at MLA in 2022!