About the Symposium

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

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.)