In Memoriam: Stuart Curran, 1940-2024
The Keats-Shelley Association of America commemorates the life of Stuart Curran, a groundbreaking scholar of Romanticism, previous editor of the Keats-Shelley Journal, and former president of the K-SAA.
Stuart Curran
August 3, 1940 – October 7, 2024
The Keats-Shelley Association of America commemorates the life of Stuart Curran, a groundbreaking scholar of Romanticism, previous editor of the Keats-Shelley Journal, and former president of the K-SAA. The annual Curran Symposia were named in his honor.
From 1974 to his retirement in 2012, he was the Vartan Gregorian Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania where he taught courses in 18th- and 19th-century British literature and chaired over two dozen doctoral dissertations. In 2004, he received the Provost’s Award for Outstanding Mentorship of Ph.D. Students, and in 2008 he won the David Delaura Teaching Award, Sponsored by the English Undergraduate Advisory Board. He mentored and supported countless scholars over the years.
His books include Poetic Form and British Romanticism (Oxford, 1986), Shelley’s Annus Mirabilis: The Maturing of an Epic Vision (Huntington Library, 1975), Shelley’s Cenci: Scorpions Ringed with Fire (Princeton, 1970). Among his edited collections are The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism (Cambridge, 2010), Mary Shelley in Her Times, edited with Betty T. Bennett (Johns Hopkins, 2000), Shelley: Poet and Legislator of the World (Johns Hopkins, 1996) with Betty T. Bennett, Blake’s Sublime Allegory: Essays on the Four Zoas, Milton, Jerusalem with Joseph Anthony Wittreich, Jr. (Wisconsin, 1973). He was integral to bringing Romantic women writers back into the spotlight, contributing to the 1740–1830 section of The Brown University Women Writers Project. His textual editing encompasses volumes of Mary Shelley’s Valperga (Oxford, 1997), The Poems of Charlotte Smith (Oxford, 1993), and Le Bossu and Voltaire on the Epic (Scholars Facsimilies and Reprints, 1970). For Romantic Circles, he compiled an annotated hypertext edition of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (both the 1818 and 1831 texts). He also created a 14-volume edition of The Works of Charlotte Smith and co-edited four volumes of Johns Hopkins University’s The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley. His accomplishments and contributions to the study of Romanticism are too tremendous to be fully listed here.
He is survived by his husband, Joseph Wittreich.
Thursday’s Redbull performance of Sardanapalus was dedicated to Stuart with a beautiful remembrance by Michael Gamer, as was the following day’s Curran Symposium. We are planning an issue of the Keats-Shelley Journal as well as roundtables at NASSR and BARS celebrating his work. We have also been collecting many remembrances from colleagues and students to read at the MLA Awards Dinner. If you would like to add something short or long, please feel free to write directly to our President, Kate Singer.
The University of Pennsylvania will be hosting a memorial service for Stuart Curran on Saturday, April 26, 2025, in Van Pelt Library. Details for the afternoon service and reception will be forthcoming.
Read the obituary from the New York Times here.
Remembrances of Stuart
October-November 2024
There is perhaps no more consequential figure in the past 50 years to the study of Percy and Mary Shelley and the building of a large and welcoming community of those devoted to the study of their works than Stuart Curran. He was for years the heart and soul of the Keats-Shelley Association--as Board member, Editor of its journal, and President. For two decades he was the genial host of the Keats-Shelley Association annual dinner at MLA, transforming it into one of the warmest professional events many of us have ever attended.
Stuart's generosity is legendary. In awarding him the Keats-Shelley Distinguished Scholar Award back in 1992, fittingly bestowed on the 200th anniversary of Shelley's birth, I proposed the playing of an academic parlor game: the challenge would be to find a single book on British Romanticism that didn't include him in its Acknowledgments section. I never did learn of a winner.
I will always remember the pleased glint in Stuart's eyes preceding one of his witticisms and his chortle after it was delivered. He was my teacher, dissertation director, mentor, life-long friend. He was also my valued colleague in editing The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Our forthcoming volume, which is dedicated to Stuart’s memory, contains his brilliant edition of Shelley's The Cenci, thus rounding off a stellar professional career that launched beyond the academic stratosphere with the publication of his first book, Shelley's Cenci: Scorpions Ringed With Fire.
For me, this is a personal loss that cuts deep. My heart goes out especially to Stuart’s beloved husband, Joe Wittreich, with whom he shared a life of joyful emotional and intellectual partnership, marked by their devotion to each other and their far flung circle of loving friends. I hope that Joe is comforted by the thought of Stuart’s enduring legacy--on me, on you, and on the worldwide community devoted to the study of Romantic era writers.
Neil Fraistat
The loss of Stuart Curran is more than a loss of a uniquely important, shining individual. Stuart was a solar system. My bookshelves have him everywhere, from his pioneering supervision of the multivolume edition of Charlotte Smith’s works, to his critical studies on P. B. Shelley (his Cenci book is still unsurpassed), to his principled, and at the time of its publication, headwind-facing-against-detractors of his interests, Poetic Form and British Romanticism, to his generous and generative Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism. And that’s just the bookshelf. Of still inestimable value is the on-line digital edition of Frankenstein. And how utterly characteristic that Stuart was corresponding with an amateur (in both senses: devotee and non-professional) enthusiast for the novel just this last year. Stuart is this kind of living presence, still. I met him in the flesh my first year as an assistant professor, at Rutgers. The regional MLA was in Philadelphia that year, and he invited me to a reception at his and Joe’s home and introduced me around. He also supported my third-only publication, on Keats’s late lyrics, in KSJ and has been cordially interested in my work ever since, as I have, his. It was Stuart who invited me to join the editorial board of KSJ, which he was editing then, and who supported the invitation that followed a decade on to join the Board of Directors at KSAA. I don’t mean to rehearse my CV, only to appreciate its multiple intersections with Stuart’s lively generosities. On the Board, over which he presided, he was a memorable presence, able to speak across generations, and across the various quarters of the association’s members, only some of which were in academia. He was always smart, tactful, and just plain witty. He was a global ambassador, too, keeping in touch with, and often visiting in person, Keats and Shelley associations everywhere ... that’s the solar system side of Stuart. And though the sun is now set, the system continues to orbit.
Susan Wolfson
Stuart advised my senior thesis on William Blake. Over the decades, he was a mentor, a generous dinner companion, and eventually a friend. He wrote more than a dozen letters for me. His scholarship was always a guiding light; the prose exquisite, the erudition boggling. While I was his student, he was learning Italian, and I would enter his office as his tutor was packing up. Italian was his seventh language. He made an exquisite gazpacho; farmed his tomatoes from terraces in both Philly and P-Town. No fort-da game will name his loss; perhaps it is he that lives and we who are bereft.
Richard Sha
I am sad to hear this news.
I have long had the deepest respect
for Stuart Curran's work.
He and his work will be greatly missed.
I am thankful for the written work
of Stuart Curran that I have in my
issues of KSAA (I own almost every
issue) and look forward to hearing
about the Collected Works of
Stuart Curran. He was a giant.
Scott J Thompson
So sad! I owed him so much and learned so much from him. He was so generous with his time and institutional efforts to promote what he loved, Romanticism. I will miss him and the scholarly world will feel his absence.
Michael Scrivener
Stuart was one of the most generous persons I’ve ever known. From the very first moment I met him, I was struck by his gift of humbleness, being so rare in academia. I will never forget his generosity in sharing his knowledge on Romantic Friendship with me, when I was asked to write a chapter about it, his wise advice and the gentle smile accompanying it. He has been, and will always remain, an inspiration to all of us fortunate enough to have known him.
Gioia Angeletti
Stuart Curran was a wondrous, endlessly generous person and a truly world-class, leading scholar and teacher of English Romanticism and literary studies in general. But here I would like to pay tribute to him as a world-class mentor, which is how I came to experience the many benefits of knowing and learning from him. Back in the late 1970s, he was the unnamed first reader for an early essay of mine on P.B. Shelley that, as an anxious Assistant Professor not yet tenured, I submitted to PMLA. Despite Stuart's enthusiasm, I later found out, the second reader was so outraged by such an approach to Shelley that PMLA decided to reject what I had sent in. After that decision was finalized, Stuart, though we had never met, made it a point to get in touch with me, to strongly support the new approach I was taking (even though it was not his own), and finally to request my piece (with some changes based on his good advice) for publication in the Keats-Shelley Journal once he became its editor. From that point on, we corresponded and met in person off and on, at which times his helpful suggestions, richly informed insights, and unwavering faith in my work encouraged, sustained, and richly informed me as I moved towards the completion of a book on Shelley that came out in 1988. Unbeknownst to me, he was the reader who persuaded Oxford UP to take the book without any changes (!), and it was his words that appeared on the back cover with a powerful endorsement that greatly helped turn my career into the very positive one that it became from then on, still aided by his advice at times, even when (as in the beginning) we did not always agree about Shelley's works. It's exceedingly rare for such an accomplished scholar to promote the work of a younger one that in some ways challenged his own, and it turns out, I soon discovered, that Stuart has done just this, even with all the extra work it takes, for more and more younger Romanticists than I can count. Everywhere I turn with colleagues my age and younger, I find the same story about Stuart's magnificent and tireless mentorship. Even when he and I have not been direct contact about a subject I have been examining, the consistent high quality of his published scholarship has been there to mentor and inspire me, especially his pioneering work (alongside others, to be sure) on rediscovering and explaining Romantic women poets. I could never have written my recent Cambridge UP Elements book on Mary Robinson and the Gothic had it not been for Stuart's own work on her and her female contemporaries. Among other things, that example means that his mentorship of so many of us will go on and on through his superb scholarship even after he himself has left us. Like others, I am sure, I find myself turning to Shelley's Adonais elegy when faced with Stuart's passing. What that poem says of Keats applies to Stuart, his ongoing legacy, and his place in literary scholarship world-wide: "The splendours of the firmament of time/May be eclipsed but are extinguished not;/Like stars to their appointed height they climb/And death is a low mist which cannot blot/The brightness it may veil." Stuart will always shine for me as the best academic mentor I have ever had, and I hope I and the rest of us can fulfill that legacy by mentoring younger scholars just as much — and hopefully as well — as he did.
Jerrold E. Hogle
When I applied for a job at Penn, Stuart was gracious enough to take me to lunch, independent of the job application. I remember his selling me tickets to the K-SAA Dinner year after year. He was a good salesman. I went to many dinners I would not otherwise have attended because of his personal warmth. I’ve used his book on poetic form every year I teach because of its excellent discussion of genre. I learned most of what I know about Shelley from him and Donald Reiman. A very kind man.
Jonathan Gross
I would like to express my sincere gratitude and appreciation for Professor Stuart Curran. As an undergraduate in his British Romanticism course at Penn, I was in awe of him. I remember his lectures, delivered in his deep and commanding voice, his praise, and his patience, for my work, and the cherry tomatoes from his garden that he would bring to share with the class. It was thanks to his encouragement and support that I went on to graduate school, and, when I came to present my first conference paper as a graduate student, there was Professor Curran, sitting in the front row. Through the years, he would always reach out with a short note of feedback or a word of congratulations. His wisdom and kindness were profoundly meaningful to me. He will be deeply missed.
Jane Kim
If you would like to add your remembrance, please email ksinger@mtholyoke.edu.
