News

2014 Mid-winter Directors Meeting

Stuart Curran, President of the Association, called the meeting of January 24, 2014, to order at 11:30 a.m. at the New York Penn Club in New York City. In attendance and constituting a quorum were William T. Buice III, Elizabeth Dolan, Doucet Devin Fischer, Robert A. Hartley, Sonia Hofkosh, Marsha Manns, Leslie Morris, Jeanne Moskal, and David H. Stam. Absent with excuse were Neil Fraistat, Anthony D. Knerr, George Krupp, Alice J. Levine, Grant Scott, Susan J. Wolfson, and Sarah M. Zimmerman.

The meeting opened with the review and approval of the minutes of the 2013 Annual Directors Meeting and the 2013 Annual Meeting, and continued with the regular reports.

Membership Report

(Robert Hartley) The Treasurer reported that, compared to 2012, the 2013 results showed an increase of eighteen individuals (+10%) and a decrease of thirty institutions (-7%). He suggested that the increase, which dramatically reverses the downward trend of recent years, can mostly likely be attributed to the membership drive by members of the Board and perhaps the implementation of PayPal in December. The decrease greatly accentuates the negative trend over the last five years, which has averaged about 2.5%. It is possible that the forthcoming appearance of the 2013 Keats-Shelley Journal (K-SJ) in Project MUSE is the cause. He noted that he has asked our contact person at Johns Hopkins University Press for a list of subscribers and plans to collate it with the non-renewals to the print version. For 2014, he added, the results are very similar: individual memberships are ahead of last year at approximately the same time, and institutional are substantially behind.

Treasurer’s Report

(Robert Hartley) The Treasurer reported that the Association’s finances remain sound. Adjusting for the late publication of the K-SJ and therefore the payment of the bills, the balances in the Association’s accounts are very close to where they were last year at this time.

President’s Report

(Stuart Curran) The President began by announcing that he would be seeking to internationalize our outreach this year. He observed that the Association was poised to have a presence (and brochures) at a number of major conferences. At the Keats conference in London in May 2014, he plans to speak on behalf of the Association, and one of our Directors will deliver a paper there. After the London meeting, the President will join other donors to the Centenary Campaign that enlarged the domain of the Keats-Shelley House in Rome for a special program there. Next, the Association will have a presence at the NASSR conference in Tokyo in mid-June: there, we will be a joint sponsor of two sessions with the Japan Byron Society, the Japan Shelley Studies Center, and the Society for British Romanticism. One session will focus on Byron and Shelley in Italy, and the other on Keats and eastern cultures. Finally, we will have a presence at the NASSR conference in Washington, D.C. in July, although the details have yet to be finalized. The President concluded that all of the above events represent opportunities to expand our membership.

Report on the Keats-Shelley Journal

(Beth Dolan for Jeanne Moskal, Editor) The Editor conveyed her team’s excitement about the imminent publication of Nora Crook’s article, “Fourteen New Letters by Mary Shelley,” in the 2013 K-SJ, which details the largest cache of unpublished Mary Shelley letters discovered in 150 years. The publication was written up in The Guardian, The Los Angeles Times, and elsewhere, and the K-SJ is in conversation with the Sunday Times of London concerning a feature article to appear at the end of January, when the 2013 K-SJ will be published. She noted that this arrival date is somewhat later than the usual November, but added that the delaying factors have been corrected, so that she expected to meet the usual November publication date in 2014. The 2014 issue is, she reported, already full, with interpretive essays on such topics as Mary Shelley’s working definition of sincerity, P. B...