K-SAA Interviews: Amanda Blake Davis for #Shelley200

Percy Bysshe Shelley died two hundred years ago this year, on 8th July 1822. Following on from the series of excellent events marking the death of John Keats in 2021, it seems only right that Shelley’s bicentennial is also celebrated in style. A group of innovative Shelley scholars have therefore put together a series of national and international events both online and in person to mark this momentous year.

K-SAA Communications Fellow, Amy Wilcockson, had the privilege of speaking to one of #Shelley200’s founders, Dr Amanda Blake Davis, about the organisers’ plans for the year, ongoing events, and her favourite Shelley poem (which caused some debate!). Check out the video below:

Dr Amanda Blake Davis is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in English Literature at the University of Derby and an Honorary Research Fellow in the School of English at the University of Sheffield, where she was awarded her PhD in 2020. She is currently preparing her first monograph, Shelley and Androgyny. Her postdoctoral project at the University of Derby explores drawings of trees and other botanical figures in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s manuscripts through what she terms the poet’s intermedial ecology. Since 2019, Amanda has served on the Executive of the British Association for Romantic Studies as a Postgraduate Representative. She has published articles in the Keats-Shelley Review, English: Journal of the English Association, and Romanticism on the Net, and her article, ‘“Ephemeral are gay gulps of laughter”: P. B. Shelley, Louis MacNeice, and the Ambivalence of Laughter’, won the 2020 English Association Essay Prize. Amanda also has links to the K-SAA as she is a past Communications Fellow, who took on the role from 2018-2019!

To follow Amanda on Twitter, click here!

To find out more about the #Shelley200 celebrations, check out the website here.

Upcoming #Shelley200 events include the Shelley and Travel online roundtable, taking place on Thursday 5th May 2022. See here for tickets! The Shelley Conference is taking place in person on 8-9th July 2022 at Keats House, London, UK. See here for more details. 

Keats House will hold a public lecture on 7 July where Prof Omar Miranda will be speaking on ‘The Shelleys and Exile’ to mark the bicentenary of the night before Shelley’s death; the conference will run from 8-9 July and will feature a ‘Shelley for Our Times’ panel chaired by Kate Singer, and there will be a ‘Shelley for Our Times’ #Shelley200 online event in the summer too.

To follow #Shelley200 on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, click on the names of the sites. Use the hashtag #Shelley200 to stay in the loop!

For more K-SAA Interviews, click here.