Melanie Rehak and Andrew Stott will discuss Stott’s new book, The Vampyre and the Poet: The Curse of Byron and the Birth of Literature’s Greatest Monsters. Lord Byron spent the summer of 1816 in the Swiss countryside with his friends John Polidori, Percy ­Bysshe Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, and Claire Clairmont. Stott recounts how, at Byron’s suggestion that the group trade ghost stories, Mary Shelley and Polidori created two of literature’s most revered monsters: Frankenstein and The Vampyre, the predecessor of Bram Sto­ker’s Dracula.

The Keats Foundation announces its second bicentenary conference, to be held from the afternoon of Friday 1 until the evening of Sunday 3 May 2015 at Guy’s Hospital London. The conference marks the 200th anniversary of John Keats enrolling to study medicine at Guy’s Hospital in 1815.

The Keats-Shelley Memorial Association is delighted to announce the launch of Young Romantics with Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy CBE as the Chairman of the judges. This unique literary prize asks writers to take their inspiration from the words, lives and ideas of the Romantics. Young writers aged between 16 and 18 are invited to enter poems and short stories specifically inspired by the Romantics. It is FREE to enter and students can submit up to two stories and two poems.

Saturday 10 January 2015. Please join us to honor this year's K-SAA Distinguished Scholars Ina Ferris and Nicholas Roe, as well as recipients of the 2014 Best Essay Award and the Pforzheimer Research Grants. The dinner takes place at the Listel Hotel in Vancouver, BC. Click below for more information and to make reservations online.

In order to mark the bicentenary of the composition of ‘Imitation of Spenser’ (1814), John Keats’s earliest known poem, the Keats-Shelley Memorial Association and the Keats Foundation are jointly hosting an afternoon (2pm-7pm) academic seminar on 31 October, Keats’s birthday, at the Keats-Shelley House in Rome.

The British Library's Discovering Literature: Romantics and Victorians offers a wealth of material on the British 19th century, including William Blake’s notebook, childhood writings of the Brontë sisters, the manuscript of the Preface to Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist, and an early draft of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest.

The Unbinding Prometheus Project, a year-long initiative spearheaded by a broadly constituted group of students and faculty who are centered at the University of Pennsylvania, has announced a slough of activities surrounding the study of Shelley's Prometheus Unbound from numerous disciplinary perspectives and at a singular depth. The project will develop across the year, so the results will be updated continuously on their site.

Ye Are Many—They Are Few, Cantata for a Just World, an art song with text and music by Norman Mathews, was performed 12 May 2014 at the Cultural Center (the former main public library) in Chicago with the VOX3 Collective Company. Mathews’ cantata turns on the problem of standing up to injustice. The tone is solemn. A powerful amount of text comes from Shelley’s “The Masque of Anarchy.”

Elizabeth Denliger, curator of the Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle at the New York Public Library, has announced the acquisition of Original Poetry by Victor and Cazire (1810), the first book of verse published by Percy Bysshe Shelley. Known to exist in only three other copies worldwide. Denliger calls it "a black tulip, one of the rarest items in the Shelleyan world." Co-authored with his sister Elizabeth, Original Poetry, says Denliger, is evidence of "Shelley's early and powerful urge to publish" and his "inclination to literary collaboration."