K-SAA 2025 Essay Prize Shortlist

We were honored to serve as the three judges for the Keats-Shelley Association of America’s annual essay prize for 2025. After reading over a hundred articles from journals focused on British Romantic literature as well as generalist venues, we were thrilled to award the prize to Carmen Faye Mathes for “Apostrophe’s Occasions: Two Postures of Abolitionist Address.” During our deliberations, as we remarked on the many strong essays we had read, we came up with the idea of creating a shortlist to recognize some of these other articles. Along with Mathes’s essay, these shortlisted articles give a sense of the exciting work currently being done in our field. As we approach the announcement of this year’s essay prize winner, we are sharing our list in the hope that it might provide a useful guide to excellent recent work.

- Tasha Eccles (Yale University), Yohei Igarashi (University of Connecticut), Eric Lindstrom (University of Vermont)

2025 Keats-Shelley Association of America Annual Essay Prize Shortlist

Carmen Faye Mathes, “Apostrophe’s Occasions: Two Postures of Abolitionist Address,” Critical Inquiry [*prize winner*]

Emily Senior, ‘‘‘Nurse Flora, in Jamaica’ and Her Afterlives,” Representations

Chris Townshend, “Verse and Voice in Equiano’s Interesting Narrative,” Modern Philology

Michelle Radnia, “Keats's Sustainable Ecopoetics: Isabella; or, the Pot of Basil,” ELH

Eric Tyler Powell, “Percy Bysshe Shelley, William Benbow, and Revolutionary Nonviolence,” Essays in Romanticism

Humberto Garcia, “Hearing Celtic Minstrelsy in Persian: Henry Louis Vivian Derozio, Kasiprasad Ghosh, and Audiation in Anglo-Indian Persianate Poetry,” Comparative Literature

Carlisle Yingst, “‘Mourn, but for the Mourners’: David Lyndsay and the Writing of Trans Romantic Histories,” European Romantic Review

Lindsey Eckert, “Bookbinding and the Look of the Romantic-Era Novel,” Studies in the Novel

Jessy Nyiri, “Our Androgynes, Ourselves: Trans Allegory in Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection in the Formation of a Manly Character,” Studies in Romanticism

David Mullins, “Shelley’s Sleeplistening: Democratic Sorority in Act IV of Prometheus Unbound,” Studies in Romanticism

Amanda Louise Johnson, “Anti-Abolitionism, US-Southern Writers, & the ‘Negatively

Capable’ Poet John Keats,” ELH