Named in honor of Stuart Curran—whose decade-long leadership as President of the K-SAA helped launch the series—the Association’s annual symposium has become a cornerstone of its programming.

Each year centers on a distinct theme while fostering interdisciplinary and public dialogue. Recent symposia have explored topics such as Keats and Shelley on the Move, 1820, The Emergence of Keats as a Poet, Frankenstein, the Romantic Futures series, Byron (2024), and Birdsong (2025), reflecting an ongoing commitment to accessibility, engagement, and new directions in Romantic studies.

See the upcoming Symposium here.

Connecting readers to books and to one another, the K-SAA Bookshelf is a collaborative initiative designed to showcase Romantic-era and related titles both new and old. Browse, suggest a title to the collection here, where you will also find the K-SAA Public Commonplace Books — a digital public engagement initiative to stitch together pieces of observations and ideas from the public.

From 2023–2025, K-SAA engaged students in the practice of commonplacing as a dynamic way to connect reading, writing, and creative expression. Students collected and organized meaningful passages, images, and ideas, building personal archives that reflected their intellectual and aesthetic interests. By situating this work within a long historical tradition while drawing on students’ existing habits of digital curation, the initiative fostered deeper engagement, critical thinking, and a stronger sense of ownership over their learning. Visit our website here.

As approaches to Romantic-era writers evolved, K-SAA launched the Romantic Futures initiative to expand engagement across scholarly and public communities. Supported by a bequest from the estate of Donald H. Reiman and co-sponsored by the Byron Society of America, the initiative introduced more interactive membership meetings, K–16 outreach, and virtual seminars.

It also created new platforms for participation, including a monthly online Coffeehouse, a “Favorite Passages” series, and a growing video archive of events. Together, these efforts fostered a more inclusive, collaborative space for sharing research, collections, and creative responses to Romanticism.

See more of our work on the Outreach Page.

Co-sponsored by the K-SAA and the Byron Society of America, Romantic Bicentennials, recognizes landmark bicentennials surrounding Keats, the Shelleys, Byron, and global culture, sponsoring some 30 events in a variety of venues. The series began in 2016 with a symposium on “The Haunted Geneva Summer of 1816” and will conclude in 2024, with the 200th anniversary of Byron’s death. Please see below for our past and upcoming Bicentennial events.

We continue to sponsor at sessions at related academic conferences, including our annual session at the conference of the Modern Language Association, which most recently has covered such topics as “Romanticism and the Caribbean” (2022), “Public Romanticisms” (2021), and “Masks of Anarchy Now: Sites of Struggle” (2020).

For those interested in K-SAA sponsorship for conference panels, please email the K-SAA Vice Presidents with a short request that includes: conference, title, brief rationale, and prospective speakers. Our Programs Committee will review and respond within a month’s time.

Initiated in Summer 2021 with the funding of six fellows with two guest speakers, and co-sponsored by Romantic Circles, this four-week summer program develops practical and theoretical resources to help support anti-racist teaching practices for writers of our period, including overall strategies and approaches to the classroom, as well as sample assignments and readings.

Celebrating the bicentennial of Frankenstein by involving a global community of over 700 partners, from Brazil to Bhutan, including universities, public libraries, schools, community centers, and museums in 45 countries who participated during Frankenweek, 24-31 October 2018, by offering public readings of the novel, screenings of films, public discussion, symposia, exhibits, lectures, and other Frankenstein-related programming. See a live-streamed reading of the entire novel at the Library of Congress here.