“Moving Beyond Traditional Spheres”: the 2024 K-SAA May Members’ Meeting
The annual May Members’ Meeting is always a wonderful time to celebrate Spring and the end of the academic year, to catch up on the organization’s current and future projects, and to share a moment of community with fellow members and all those interested in the lives and works of the Keats-Shelley circle and beyond. You don’t have to be a member to attend (although we appreciate the support!), so mark your calendar to join us next year. Information about the meeting is usually available on our blog and social media by April.
This year’s meeting focused on K-SAA’s public outreach projects, including the recently launched Arts & Public Engagement Award (whose winner Lita Judge presented) and other initiatives based on the 2023-24 theme of Commonplacing. These projects seek to engage audiences across and beyond academia in order to generate excitement about Romantic-era literature and highlight its continuing relevance. The meeting took place on Thursday May 16, 3 PM EDT 2024 via Zoom and was hosted by board member Bryonie Carter and attended by 52 participants. The recording will be available soon. Read on for details and links. Scroll to the bottom of the page for participant reactions!
K-SAA president Kate Singer opened by providing a link to reports on K-SAA’s activities and giving brief updates, including the release of a new issue of the Keats-Shelley Journal this summer, with accompanying digital content, and information about the October 2024 Curran Symposium in NYC, “Performing Politics.” K-SAA has also recently updated its Mission and Values Statement.
Singer moved for the vote on new board members to be postponed until June, when ballots will be sent by email and voting by proxy will take place.
K-SAA officer Olivia Loksing Moy then gave an update on the 2023-24 public outreach Commonplacing project, which challenges typical ideas of Romantic authorship, canonicity, and literacy, as well as offering new ways to access and experience Romantic text. Accompanying this project is the virtual commonplace book launched by Comms Fellow Shellie Audsley and focused on “Readers and Reading.” Shellie has announced a second volume of the commonplace book entitled “Field Notes on Freedom,” which asks contributors to share notes from their literary travels and observations of historical objects and places related to the topic of freedom in the Romantic era.
As a testament to the reach of the project, twelve faculty are currently using Commonplacing in the classroom and 300 students at all levels have made commonplace books. Many of the instructors will publish their reflections on commonplacing and pedagogy in a special issue of K-SJ+, the online supplement to the journal. The contributors to this special issue include non-tenured lecturers and other faculty who represent and serve community colleges, Hispanic-serving institutions, STEM and Agricultural institutions, public and private colleges, and multilingual first-year composition classrooms.The work published in the special issue will not only include assignments, syllabi, and lessons engaging with commonplacing, but also case studies of unique commonplace books, pedagogical reflections, short scholarly articles, interviews, and personal and creative responses to the practice of commonplacing. The theme for the next Public Outreach initiative will be announced in due course.
The Recited Verse website has been launched by Omar Miranda in collaboration with literary scholars and computer science students at NYU and University of San Francisco. This accessible platform facilitates the sharing of spoken poetry—including translations—from around the world.
Board member Lissette Lopez Szwydky introduced Lita Judge, who won the inaugural Arts & Public Engagement Award for Mary’s Monster: Love, Madness, and How Mary Shelley Created Frankenstein, which, for Lopez Szwydky, makes Mary Shelley the protagonist of her most famous novel. Judge related how her childhood spent in remote areas with lack of access to books, along with her dyslexia, shaped her ambition to make books that were accessible to young readers. She discussed her creative process, which included years of studying the manuscript of Frankenstein at the Bodleian library and following in Mary Shelley’s footsteps to collect notes and images. Judge wanted to highlight Mary’s isolation and grief in 1816 as well as to dispel versions of the inception of Frankenstein that give too much credit to Byron’s ghost story competition. A particular challenge was to visualize Shelley’s profound feelings of loss, devastation and continued passion for life within the confines of the illustrated panels. Full spread illustrations provided more room to give form to their abstract shape so that they may work with the accompanying verses and resonate with the reader.
Lissette Lopez Szwydky shared a Teacher's Guide for those interested in including Judge’s graphic novel in their classroom.
Judge took questions from the attendees on many aspects of the book: typographical elements, genres, how she speaks to those developing verbal and visual literacy, her personal opinion about Byron(‘s cruelty), and a possible Goya influence.
Meeting duration approx. 1.5 hours.
Here’s what participants had to say:
Prof. Any Weldon: I felt energized by the collegiality and presentations shared in this members' meeting, and by the K-SAA's commitment to recognizing outstanding scholarship and creative work and extending its "living hand" (ha!) to new audiences. Olivia's "Commonplacing" project gives me fresh ideas for how to incorporate into a literature class the notebook-keeping that can be such a great part of creative pedagogy, and Lita Judge's images from Mary's Monster, particularly of the Creature's hands and the rivering lines that become lightning bolts on some pages and strands of hair on others, invited me to see this beloved text in a new way, literally and figuratively. Thank you!
Hannah Blanning: As someone who has done arts and humanities outreach work, I was thrilled to see K-SAA moving beyond traditional spheres through public engagement initiatives to work with different age groups while infusing literary studies with creative processes. The K-SAA Commonplacing theme for this year inspired me to create a Commonplace Book at the 2024 British Women Writers Conference, so it was both helpful and exciting to hear Olivia Moy's presentation on Commonplacing and to see examples of work that others are doing. I was also mesmerized by Lita Judge's talk on her book. It not only opened up a new pathway into teaching Frankenstein for me but also brought home the extent to which her artwork and poetry constitute a new form of creative criticism that is experiential and dynamic.
Consider becoming a K-SAA member to help support the A&PE as well as similar awards and projects.
Follow us on Twitter and Instagram to keep with the latest from K-SAA. New or noteworthy on the blog: info on contributing to the second virtual commonplace book, the first episode of the “Global Mapping” podcast, reviews of the 2023 film Napoleon (links to Part 1 and part 2), and reports from the Curran Symposium in October. Coming soon to the blog: written interviews with Ella Killgallon (director, Keats-Shelley Memorial House) and Lesley McDowell (author of Clairmont) and video interviews with Joanna Brown (author of the Lizzie and Belle Mysteries) and Omar Miranda and Kate Singer (editors of Percy Shelley for Our Times). Plus, a new entry in our “Uncovering the Archive Series”: Molly Watson discusses her visit to the Coleridge archives at UT Austin. To contribute to the blog, write to Comms Director Mariam Wassif, Ksaacomm@gmail.com or mwassif@andrew.cmu.edu
