K-SAA Annual Awards Celebration for 2021 Report

Saturday 8th January saw the Annual Awards Celebration of the Keats-Shelley Association of America take place on Zoom. The turnout was excellent, with friends and colleagues joining us from all around the world – special thanks to those of you who came to the awards even though it was very late at night in your time zones! Please see below for a recording of the event, and for a brief report of the Celebration.

Attendees were welcomed by Professor Neil Fraistat, the K-SAA President, who introduced the event and thanked current K-SAA board and organisation members, collaborators, and friends.

The Celebration then began, with tributes to the first of the K-SAA’s 2021 Distinguished Scholar Awards to Professor Nicola J. Watson.

Professor Watson’s research has influenced many thanks to The Literary Tourist: Readers and Places in Romantic and Victorian Britain (Palgrave, 2006), which investigated the history of the phenomenon of literary tourism. Following on from this monograph, The Author’s Effects: On the Writer’s House Museum (OUP, 2020), explores the cult of the author through investigating the emergence of the writer’s house museum as idea and actuality.

Watson is also Association Co-ordinator for ERA (European Romanticisms in Association), a pan-European association of scholarly institutions and heritage institutions devoted to the arts and culture of the Romantic period. The popular RÊVE (Romantic Europe: The Virtual Exhibition) is a large part of this project, alongside a series of events, and the AHRC-funded Dreaming Romantic Europe (DREAM) project, that ran from 2018-2020.

Watson’s encomium was given by Professor Mary Favret, and a video featuring congratulations from Watson’s colleagues and friends was also played.

Professor Olivia Moy then presented the two Carl H. Pforzheimer, Jr., Research Grants for 2022.

The first of these was to Dr Valentina Aparacio, Queen Mary University of London for her project ‘Women Meeting Women: Scottish Travellers in Latin America, 1780-1880’.

Aparacio’s project will explore how five Scottish or Scottish-connected travel women writers gained new insights into gender, race, and class as a result of their interactions with Latin American women. This project looks at decolonization in exciting ways, not from the English metropole but from the Northern periphery. The Pforzheimer Grant will be used to examine the influence of Brazilian empress Maria Leopoldina on Maria Graham, through looking at letters in the National Library of Brazil in Rio de Janeiro. You can follow Dr Aparacio on Twitter here.

The second Pforzheimer Grant was awarded to Elisa Cozzi, Queens College, Oxford for her project ‘Italy and the Irish Romantics: Networks, Nations and Literary Encounters 1798-1848’.

This project explores how Irish writers in exile in Italy developed a national self-consciousness and pre-occupation with freedom through their engagement with Italian literature and culture. Cozzi’s study of post-union Ireland and pre-unification Italy therefore produces a picture of national identity influenced from without and within. The Pforzheimer Grant will be used to look at papers and unpublished works at the Pforzheimer Collection held in the New York Public Library. You can follow Cozzi on Twitter here.

Professors Richard Sha and Anne Wallace then presented the two 2021 Essay Prize joint winners.

The prizes went to Professor Celeste Langan for her essay ‘Repetition Run Riot: Refrains, Slogans, and Graffiti’, Wordsworth Circle, Spring 2021. 

The joint prize also was given to Professor Padma Rangarajan for her essay ‘”With a Knife at One’s Throat”: Irish Terrorism in The O’Briens and the O’Flahertys’, Nineteenth-Century Literature, December 2020. 

The Awards were concluded with the tributes to K-SAA’s second 2021 Distinguished Scholar, Professor Jon Klancher.

Klancher’s research focuses on later eighteenth and early nineteenth-century British culture, book and reading history, and the sociology of literature. Recent monographs include Transfiguring the Arts and Sciences: Knowledge and Cultural Institutions in the Romantic Age (Cambridge University Press), which received the Jean-Pierre Barricelli Prize for 2016.

Professor Klancher has also edited A Concise Companion to the Romantic Age for Blackwell as well as contributing to a wide range of collections and reference books. Additionally, he is author of The Making of English Reading Audiences 1790-1832, and related essays on Romantic-age print history.

A video of celebration was played for all attendees, then the encomium was given by Professor Jonathan Sachs.

Professor Neil Fraistat then gave his final remarks, before the Awards drew to a close.

Thank you to all attendees, plus a huge thank you to all who had a hand in the smooth running of the Awards. We cannot wait for 2022’s Awards next year!