K-SAA Virtual Roundtable: Toward an Anti-Racist, “Undisciplined” Romanticism

With deep appreciation for their expertise and insights, the Keats-Shelley Association of America asks our Roundtable participants: what new frameworks—theoretical, textual, generic, historical, multiracial—could and should transform the study of British Romanticism and help the field find modalities of anti-racism worthy of our moment? To what extent should we see the questions “of our moment” as, also, historical questions? How can BIPOC lives begin to matter more fundamentally to the study of British Romanticism, and within the field of British Romanticism? And, yet more pointedly: whither British Romanticism, and Romanticist associations for the study of the field, in the age of Black Lives Matter? Could John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley, or Mary Shelley for that matter, ever factor into such a shift in approach, which is to ask: can an organization named after these figures ever effectively decenter them? How important is it that they be decentered for anti-racist work to flourish in the field?

This is a virtual roundtable in two phases. In the first phase, expert scholars respond to the colloquium topic in short separate videos. In the second phase, coming early in 2021, we convene the participants from this video series on Zoom for a one-hour colloquium discussion moderated by César Soto of Grace College. The conversation will be recorded and, along with these videos, hosted on the K-SAA website.