A Message from the President
In his letter to K-SAA members last year, Stuart Curran noted our new two-tier price structure for better enabling graduate students and contingently-employed faculty to attend our annual awards dinner at MLA conventions. I’d like to echo him this year in asking you to alert members of the profession whom you know to qualify for the lower rate and encourage them to attend this important and wonderfully convivial professional occasion. As always, we will be celebrating outstanding work in our field, with an Essay Prize and Distinguished Scholar Awards. This year, we will also be celebrating Stuart’s extraordinary decade-long tenure as President of K-SAA. Please join us in honoring him! Stuart also noted last year the inauguration of our “Romantic Bicentennials” initiative, undertaken in partnership with the Byron Society of America, which has now had its official launch in May with a splendid symposium on “The Geneva Summer,” hosted by the New York Public Library. Our 2017 Symposium, “The Emergence of Keats as a Poet,” will be convened by Susan Wolfson and Kate Singer at Fordham University in October 2017. It is being book-ended by K-SAA bicentennially themed sessions at MLA in 2017 and 2018. In May 2018, we are also looking forward to a two-day symposium, “Frankenstein Then and Now, 1818-2018,” convened by Jerrold Hogle and Anne Mellor, to be hosted by the Huntington Library. In addition to these symposia, “Romantic Bicentennials” has provided seed funding for seven “Networked Events,” including a dramatic reading of Byron’s Manfred by the Red Bull Theater and a related symposium this coming April in New York; “The Shelley Conference 2017” in September at the University of London; and “The Keats Letters Project,” a creative digital project chronicling Keats’s epistolary writing on the 200th year anniversary of each letter. Look forward in the near future to details about our Frankenreads project, to be held on October 31, 2018, which aims to do for Frankenstein what has been done for Joyce’s Ulysses on Bloomsday. You can find out more about Romantic Bicentennials, including how to apply for commemorative event seed-funding here: http://romantics200.org. We are grateful for the generous support of the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation and of Liz and George Krupp, which has helped make the whole initiative possible, and we would likewise be grateful to any of you who are able to upgrade your membership level to a higher category to help fund this exciting collective work.
With best wishes,
Neil Fraistat
President, Keats-Shelley Association of America