Connecting readers to books and to one another, the K-SAA Bookshelf is a collaborative initiative designed to showcase Romantic-era and related titles both new and old. Browse, suggest a title to the collection here, where you will also find the K-SAA Public Commonplace Books — a digital public engagement initiative to stitch together pieces of observations and ideas from the public.

We warmly invite you to participate in K-SAA’s 2023-2024 public programming initiative. Over the course of the year, we have been exploring the ancient scholarly practice of commonplace book-keeping along with its vibrant modern descendent, scrapbooking. Visit our website here.

How are the foundations for understanding the writers of our period changing? Stay tuned for news about ways you can help shape our upcoming Romantic Futures series, funded by a generous bequest from the estate of Donald H. Reiman and co-sponsored by the Byron Society of America.

In the works are more interactive annual membership meetings, K-16 outreach initiatives, and virtual seminars, as well as several new series, including a monthly online Coffeehouse that will provide a public forum for academics and non-academics to share their thoughts, collections, and creative responses to topics of interest to our members; a “Favorite Passages” series enabling members to post on our website their favorite passage from a relevant work, along with a short explanation about why they’ve chosen the passage; and a video collection of our events.

See more of our work on the Outreach Page.

The Association has periodically run conferences, such as the 2011 symposium “Was There A Literary Regency?” It decided in 2016 to regularize this practice through an annual symposium dedicated to serving the professional and public communities invested in the writers of our period and named after Stuart Curran for his brilliant, decade-long leadership as President of the K-SAA, during which time he initiated the Symposium series. Recent symposia include “Keats and Shelley on the Move,” “1820: Aesthetics, Politics, and Legacies of Romanticism,” “The Emergence of Keats as a Poet,” and “Frankenstein: Then and Now.”

Co-sponsored by the K-SAA and the Byron Society of America, Romantic Bicentennials, recognizes landmark bicentennials surrounding Keats, the Shelleys, Byron, and global culture, sponsoring some 30 events in a variety of venues. The series began in 2016 with a symposium on “The Haunted Geneva Summer of 1816” and will conclude in 2024, with the 200th anniversary of Byron’s death. Please see below for our past and upcoming Bicentennial events.

We continue to sponsor at sessions at related academic conferences, including our annual session at the conference of the Modern Language Association, which most recently has covered such topics as “Romanticism and the Caribbean” (2022), “Public Romanticisms” (2021), and “Masks of Anarchy Now: Sites of Struggle” (2020).

For those interested in K-SAA sponsorship for conference panels, please email the K-SAA Vice Presidents with a short request that includes: conference, title, brief rationale, and prospective speakers. Our Programs Committee will review and respond within a month’s time.

Initiated in Summer 2021 with the funding of six fellows with two guest speakers, and co-sponsored by Romantic Circles, this four-week summer program develops practical and theoretical resources to help support anti-racist teaching practices for writers of our period, including overall strategies and approaches to the classroom, as well as sample assignments and readings.

Celebrating the bicentennial of Frankenstein by involving a global community of over 700 partners, from Brazil to Bhutan, including universities, public libraries, schools, community centers, and museums in 45 countries who participated during Frankenweek, 24-31 October 2018, by offering public readings of the novel, screenings of films, public discussion, symposia, exhibits, lectures, and other Frankenstein-related programming. See a live-streamed reading of the entire novel at the Library of Congress here.