K-SAA Essay Prize

In order to recognize outstanding scholarship devoted to the writers of our period and the culture in which they lived, the Keats-Shelley Association of America has since 1986 conferred an annual Essay Award. The awards are adjudicated by a three-member committee specially designated by the Board of Directors and are conferred at K-SAA’s annual dinner at the Modern Language Association’s conference. Encomia for Award-winning essays are published in the Keats-Shelley Journal.

Recipients of Keats-Shelley Association Essay Prize

  • 2023: Lily Gurton-Wachter

    "Reading by Firefly.” Studies in Romanticism, Vol 62, number 1, Spring 2023: 77-102.

    Honorable Mention: Eric Tyler Powell, “Form, History and the Politics of Lyric in Shelley’s ‘Ode to the West Wind,’” ELH, Vol 90, Issue 3, (2023) 723-765.

  • 2022: Kir Kuiken

    “Unavowed Community in Kleist’s Betrothal in San Domingo.” Haïti’s Literary Legacies: Romanticism and the Unthinkable Revolution, edited by Deborah Elise and Kir Kuiken, Bloomsbury, 2022, 117-140.

    Learn more about the edited collection here.

  • 2021: Celeste Langan and Padma Rangarajan

    Celeste Langan: “Repetition Run Riot: Refrains, Slogans, and Graffiti,” Wordsworth Circle, Spring 2021.

    Padma Rangarajan ‘”With a Knife at One’s Throat’: Irish Terrorism in The O’Briens and the O’Flahertys,” Nineteenth-Century Literature, December 2020.

  • 2020: Jessica Roberson

    “Remembrance and Remediation: Mediating Disability and Literary Tourism in the Romantic Archive,” Studies in Romanticism 59.1 (2020): 85-108.

  • 2020 Honorable Mention: Mina Gorji

    “John Clare and the Language of Listening,” Romanticism 26.2 (2020), 153-67.

  • 2019: Alexander Freer

    ‘Percy Shelley’s Touch; or, Lyric Depersonalization’, Modern Philology 117.1 (2019), 91-114.

  • 2018: Greg Ellermann

    “A Poetics of Ether,” European Romantic Review 29.3 (2018), 389-98.

  • 2017: Anne McCarthy

    “Reading the Red Bull Sublime,” PMLA 132.3 (2017), 543-57.

  • 2016: Mark Canuel

    “Race, Writing, and Don Juan,” Studies in Romanticism 54.3 (Fall 2015), 303-328.

  • 2015: Yohei Igarashi

    “Keats’s Ways: The Dark Passages of Mediation and Why He Gives Up Hyperion,” Studies in Romanticism 53.2 (Summer 2014), 171-194.

  • 2014: Richard Adelman

    “Idleness and Vacancy in Shelley’s ‘Mont Blanc,’” Keats-Shelley Journal 62 (2013), 62-79.

  • 2013: Matthew C. Borushko

    “The Politics of Subreption: Resisting the Sublime in Shelley’s ‘Mont Blanc,’” Studies in Romanticism 52.2 (Summer 2013), 225-252.

  • 2012: Scott J. Juengel and Rei Terada

    Scott J. Juengel: “Mary Wollstonecraft’s Perpetual Disaster“

    Rei Terada: “Hegel’s Bearings”

    Both essays appeared in Romanticism and Disaster: A Romantic Circles Praxis Volume (January 2012).

  • 2011: Colin Jager

    “Shelley After Atheism,” Studies in Romanticism 49.4 (Winter 2010), 611-632.

  • 2010: Nancy Yousef

    “Romanticism, Psychoanalysis, and the Interpretation of Silence,” European Romantic Review 21.5 (October 2010), 653-672.

  • 2009: Brendan Corcoran

    “Keats’s Death: Towards a Posthumous Poetics,” Studies in Romanticism 48.2 (Summer 2009), 321-48.

  • 2008: Timothy Morton

    “John Clare’s Dark Ecology,” Studies in Romanticism 47.2 (Summer 2008), 179-93.

  • 2007: Stephen Cheeke

    “‘What So Many Have Told, Who Would Tell Again?’: Romanticism and the Commonplaces of Rome,” European Romantic Review (December 2006).

  • 2006: Matthew Buckley

    “’A Dream of Murder’: The Fall of Robespierre and the Tragic Imagination,” Studies in Romanticism, 44: 4 (Winter 2005)

  • 2006 Honorable Mention: Hadley J. Mozer

    “‘I WANT a hero’: Advertising for an Epic Hero in Don Juan,” Studies in Romanticism 44.2 (Summer 2005).

  • 2005: Mary Favret

    “Everyday War” ELH 72.3 (2005), 605-33; and Jennifer Jones, “Sounds Romantic: the Castrato and English Poetics Around 1800,” in Romanticism and Opera, ed. Gillen D’Arcy Wood, Romantic Circles Praxis (May 2005).

  • 2004: Orrin N. C. Wang

    “Coming Attractions: Lamia and Cinematic Sensation,” Studies in Romanticism 42.4 (Winter 2003), 461-500.

  • 2003: Charles Rzepka

    “‘Cortez–or Balboa, or Somebody Like That’: Form, Fact, and Forgetting in Keats’s ‘Chapman’s Homer’ Sonnet.” Keats-Shelley Journal 51 (2002), 35-75.

  • 2002: Denise Gigante

    “Keats’s Nausea,” Studies in Romanticism 40 (2001); Honorable Mention: Andrew Elfenbein, “Byron and the Fantasy of Compensation,” European Romantic Review 12.3 (Summer 2001).

  • 2001: Gary Dyer

    “Thieves, Boxers, Sodomites, Poets: Being Flash to Byron’s Don Juan” PMLA 116.3 (May 2001), 562-78; runner-up: Deidre Lynch, “Gothic Libraries and National Subjects” Studies in Romanticism 40.1 (Spring 2001), 29-48.

  • 2000: Tricia Lootens

    “Receiving the Legend, Rethinking the Writer: Letitia Landon and the Poetess Tradition,” in Romanticism and Women Poets: Opening the Doors of Reception, ed. Harriet Kramer Linkin and Stephen C. Behrendt. (Lexington, KY: UP of Kentucky, 1999): 242-59.

  • 1999: Noah Herringman

    “‘Stones so wondrous cheap'” Studies in Romanticism 37.1 (Spring 1998), 43-62.

  • 1998: Ina Ferris

    “Writing on the Border: the National Tale, Female Writing, and the Public Sphere,” in Romanticism, History, and the Possibility of Genre, ed. Tilottama Rajan and Julia Wright (CUP, 1998).

  • 1997: Maureen Noelle McLane

    “Literature Species: Populations, ‘Humanities,’ and Frankenstein” ELH 63.4 (Winter 1996), 959-88.

  • 1996: Julie A. Carlson

    “Forever Young: Master Betty and the Queer State of Youth in English Romanticism,” South Atlantic Quarterly 95.3 (summer 1996), 575-603.

  • 1995: Sonia Hofkosh

    “Sexual Politics and Literary History: William Hazlitt’s Keswick Escapade and Sarah Hazlitt’s Journal,” in At the Limits of Romanticism: Essays in Cultural, Feminist, and Materialist Criticism, ed. Mary A. Favret and Nicola J. Watson (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1994), 125-42.

  • 1994: Jerome Christensen and Neil Fraistat

    Jerome Christensen: “The Romantic Movement at the End of History,” Critical Inquiry (Spring 1994), 452-76;

    Neil Fraistat: “Illegitimate Shelley: Radical Piracy and the Textual Edition as Cultural Performance,” PMLA (May 1994), 409-23.

  • 1993: Anne D. Wallace

    “Farming on Foot: Tracking Georgic in Clare and Wordsworth,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 34 (Winter 1992), 509-40.

  • 1992: Alan Bewell

    “Keats’s ‘Realm of Flora,'” Studies in Romanticism 31.1 (Spring 1992), 71-98.

  • 1991: Margaret Homans

    “Keats Reading Women, Women Reading Keats,” Studies in Romanticism 29.3 (Fall 1990), 341-370.

  • 1990: Kim Ian Michasiw

    “The Social Other: Don Juan and the Genesis of the Self,” Mosaic 22.2 (1989), 29-48.

  • 1989: Tilottama Rajan

    “Wollstonecraft and Godwin: Reading the Secrets of the Political Novel,” Studies in Romanticism 27.2 (Summer 1988), 221-251.

  • 1988: Susan Wolfson

    “‘Their she condition’: Cross-dressing and the Politics of Gender in Don Juan,” ELH 54.3 (Autumn 1987), 585-617.

  • 1987: Mark Edmundson

    “Keats’s Mental Stance,” Studies in Romanticism 26.1 (Spring 1987), 85-104.

  • 1986: Nancy Moore Goslee

    “Shelley at Play: A Study of Sketch and Text in his Prometheus Notebooks,” The Huntington Library Quarterly 48.3 (Summer 1985), 211-255.