Symposium Schedule: October 28, 2023

9:15 AM - Welcome and Opening Remarks

Kate Singer, President of the K-SAA

9:30-10:45 AM - Approaching the Future 

Joseph Albernaz (Columbia University): "Below from Romanticism: Future Pasts." 

Kristina Huang (U of Wisconsin Madison):  "Black Life Unbound in the 18th Century." 

Diana Little (Princeton U):  “Romantic Rocks, Indigenous Traces.”

11:00 AM -12:15 PM - A conversation with Denise Ferreira da Silva, author of A Global Idea of Race and Unpayable Debt

Denise Ferreira da Silva (NYU)

Interlocutor:  Samiha Khalil (UC Irvine)

12:15-2:00 PM - Lunch

2:00-3:15 PM - Collaborating on the Future  

A conversation with the editors of The Cambridge Companion to Romanticism and World Literature, the Handbook to Global Literature and Culture in the Romantic Era (Routledge), and The Cambridge Companion to Romanticism and Race

Emily Sun (Barnard College), Arif Camoglu (NYU Shanghai), Omar Miranda (University of San Francisco), Gaura Narayan (SUNY Purchase), Kate Singer (Mt Holyoke College), and Eugenia Zuroski (McMaster University)

3:30-4:45 PM - Concurrent Workshops  

We hope these workshops will generate ideas about how the organization might “fund structures to begin to actuate the transmission of culture and critical thought to current and future diverse readers.” 

Workshop 1: Classes
Moderated by Karen Swann (Williams College)

What are the challenges and possibilities presented by teaching a more capaciously-imagined Romanticism? How can we extend our attention beyond the “Big Six”; beyond British and European literatures; beyond the dates historically delimiting the period? How do we accomplish this as our sense of “the classroom” shifts in response to the changing demographics and interests of today’s college students? How might we most effectively embrace the importance and potential of teaching in other spaces, including high schools, prisons, and reading groups that draw non-academic readers (as, for example, in prison-abolition reading groups that include 18th and 19th century texts)?

We are looking for volunteers willing to share syllabi, pedagogical strategies, and/or reading lists that take up this challenge. Please contact Karen Swann (kswann@williams.edu) if you have designed a course or participated in a reading group that could serve as a jumping-off point for discussion. We would be grateful for your contribution to our workshop!

Workshop 2: Commons (Hybrid session)
Moderated by Bakary Diaby (Skidmore College)

This workshop will build on K-SAA’s current public outreach initiative for the 2023-4 academic year, titled "Commonplacing." The project intends to be a resource for teachers and students of all grades levels and for any interested members of the public. The workshop will also reflect on a Commonplacing Pedagogy Workshop (more information forthcoming).

We hope to use this workshop as a general space to conceive of other projects that can engage the public, as well as other kinds of resources we should make available to further the association’s goals. How can we create a more inclusive community around the study and appreciation of Keats, the Shelleys, their circles, and their contexts? How might we, in broadening our understanding of the past, expand access to a more diverse array of readers, and preserve Romantic studies for the future?

For more, please see https://www.k-saa.org/commonplacing-home
N.B. Symposium participants will receive a Zoom link for this workshop before the event via the email they use for registration.

Workshop 3: Publics
Moderated by Lennie Hanson

This session will be led by volunteer organizers from the Interference Archive, an open access archive that houses materials at the intersection of social movements and cultural production. Making posters, flyers, publications, zines, books, T-shirts and buttons, moving images, and audio recordings available to the public and to activists, the Interference Archive operates on a collaborative basis and as “an archive from below.”

Inspired by the materials and the collective orientation of the Interference Archive, this workshop will encourage participants to expand our understanding of what counts as an archive, and to open up questions about the forms of cultural production relevant to literary studies. What ways might an open-access archive inspire new practices in our classrooms? How might contemporary ephemera accessed or produced by students in their ordinary lives be connected to the histories and literatures we teach?

4:45-5:15 PM - Collective brainstorming session on “Envisioning Romantic Futures”

Workshop participants will offer their ideas, with the hope of developing seed projects for the new K-SAA Romantic Futures grants.

5:15-6:15 PM - Wine and cheese reception, sponsored by the Byron Society of America

With additional support from The Byron Society of America and the Fordham Romanticists Group

Click here to register

Co-organizers: Eric Eisner, Olivia Loksing Moy & Ann Wierda Rowland

Friday, October 28, 2022

The Grolier Club

47 East 60th Street

New York, NY 10022

9:00 am - 6:00 pm

Keats and Shelley on the Move is a Stuart Curran symposium to mark the bicentennials of the deaths of John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley. We look back to 1821 and 1822 as jumping off points to trace how these major figures of the Romantic period and their contemporaries have moved forward and outward – into new worlds, new languages, new media, and new material forms. Our title nods to Ann Rigney’s The Afterlives of Walter Scott: Memory on the Move, and we share her interest in how Romantic-era literary figures and their texts move across media, time periods, and national traditions, becoming fertile sites for both cultural memory and for new creative and cultural practices. Our speakers – poets, critics, curators, and collectors – will address the global, contemporary, remediated, translated, collected, and curated figures of Keats, Shelley, and their contemporaries. We hope the conversations of the day will offer a glimpse of these Romantic writers and texts going global, even as they are already gone, having crossed thresholds and boundaries, having escaped, still on the move. Follow this link to speaker bios.

Thursday, October 27

NYPL Pforzheimer Books and Manuscripts Display:

We invite participants to visit a display of books and manuscripts by Keats, the Shelleys, and their fellow travelers in time and space at the Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle, New York Public Library, 476 Fifth Avenue, Room 319. This display is curated for the occasion by Carolyn Vega of the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature and Liz Denlinger of the Pforzheimer Collection.

Visitors are welcome:

Thursday 2:00 - 5:00 pm

Friday 11:30 am - 2:00 pm

Friday, October 28

Coffee and tea are available starting 9:00 a.m.

9:15 am: Welcome and opening remarks: Kate Singer, President of the KSAA

9:30-10:45 am: Shelley's Contemporary "Future"

Moderator: Julie Carlsen (NYPL)

• Iris Cushing (CUNY Graduate Center): "A Magickal Working: di Prima on Shelley's Lyrical Alchemy."

• Eric Lindstrom (University of Vermont): "Improvisation and Queer Elegy: The Death of Shelley in The New York School."

• Judith Goldman (University at Buffalo): "Circling Shelley: Intertext, Anachronism, and Connective Speculation."

(Coffee break: coffee/tea/cookies available)

11:00 am-12:15 pm: “And they are gone: ay ages long ago”

Moderator: Sonia Hofkosh (Tufts)

• Omar F. Miranda (University of San Francisco): "The New Mesoamerican Locodescriptive Poem: Jose María Heredia’s ‘En el teocalli de Cholula’” (1820).

• Matt Sandler (Columbia University): "'Ere Sleep Comes Down': Freedom Dreams, Social Death, and Keats in Black Romanticism."

• Tomoko Nakagawa (University of the Sacred Heart, Tokyo): "The Creature Stands at a Crossroads: the 1889-90 Japanese Translation of Frankenstein."

12:15-2:00 pm Lunch Break: attendees will lunch on their own at nearby restaurants

We invite participants to visit a display of books and manuscripts by Keats, the Shelleys, and their fellow travelers in time and space at the Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle, New York Public Library, 476 Fifth Avenue, Room 319.

2:00-3:15 pm: Romantic Remediations: New Books

Moderator: Emily Sun (Barnard)

• Lissette Lopez Szwydky (University of Arkansas): Transmedia Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century (Ohio State).

• Mike Goode (Syracuse University): Romantic Capabilities: Blake, Scott, Austen and the New Messages of Old Media (Oxford).

• Judith Pascoe (Florida State University): On the Bullet Train with Emily Brontë: Wuthering Heights in Japan (Michigan).

(Coffee break: coffee/tea/cookies available)

3:30-4:45 pm: Visible in the Shape of a Book

Moderator: Eve Kahn (Grolier Club)

A panel of collectors and artists featuring Romantic-era or Romantic-inspired treasures of Grolier Club members and friends:

• William Buice III (K-SAA & Grolier Club)

• Jack Lynch (Rutgers University)

• Mark Samuels Lasner (University of Delaware Library)

• Barbara Henry (Harsimus Press)

• David Solo (Private Collector)

• Catherine Payling (Christie’s)

4:45 pm: Concluding remarks: Eric Eisner, Olivia Loksing Moy, Ann Wierda Rowland & Kate Singer

5:00-6:00 pm: Wine and cheese reception. Sponsored by the Byron Society of America.

6:00-7:00 pm: The Grolier Club invites you to join their Halloween Party and Reading with food and refreshments, in the Morris Room, 3rd Floor from 6:00 to 7:30 p.m. (Festive attire encouraged.)

Join here by Zoom

In this Teach-in we will explore persistent patterns of refusals in proclaimed anti-racist pedagogy in traditionally white disciplines of Eighteenth-Century Studies, Romanticism, and Nineteenth-Century Studies.

• What are persisting points of obscurity in praxis aiming to be fully anti-racist?

• What is in danger of being ‘redacted’ (Christina Sharpe) as white fields incorporate Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian and decolonial studies?

• What must be continually divested in anti-racist pedagogical praxis?

10am-12pm EST Plenary talks and Discussion  

• Opening: Kerry Sinanan  (UTSA, event organizer)

• Global Literatures & Cultures in the Romantic Period Editorial Collective

• Middle East and North Africa: Mariam Wassif (Carnegie-Mellon University)

• Queer Studies and Intersectionality: Jeremy Chow (Bucknell University)

1pm-3pm EST Workshops and Discussion 

1. J. Ereck Jarvis: Black Redactions

2. Mariam Wassif: Middle Eastern/North Africa Diaspora in the period

3. Jeremy Chow: Queer Intersectionalities

4. Kristina Huang: Dedicated session on The Woman of Colour (1808)

5. Shelby Johnson: Indigenous Sexuality and Gender Studies

6. Sam Plasencia: Designing Anti-Racist Assignments