The International Byron Societies, 2013–2014

Byron Society of America

In the past year, the Byron Society of America has completed its transition from New York to its new home at the University of Virginia. The society’s co-founder Marsha Manns has stepped back from her longstanding position as executive director (though she remains an active board member), and Andrew Stauffer has been elected as the incoming president, with Peter Graham as vice president and G. Todd Davis as treasurer. Paul Douglass has also joined the Board of Directors. Our institutional relationship with Virginia will give the BSA new resources to further the study and appreciation of Byron in North America. A major redesign of the society’s web site has just been completed with the help of technical advisor Purdom Lindblad, and the new site is now live at http://byronsociety.org.

The BSA continues to host panels at the annual Modern Language Association conference. At the 2014 conference, held in Chicago in January, the BSA panel was devoted to ‘New Directions in Byron Studies’, organised by Halina Adams (Delaware) and focusing on the work of emerging scholars. Jacob Hughes (Penn State) spoke on the ‘aesthetics of nausea’ in Byron’s work, Rebecca Nesvet (UNC-Chapel Hill) spoke on ‘coterie dynamics’ in The Island, and Brian Rejack (Illinois State) spoke on book history and Don Juan. The session was very well-attended, and the high quality of the papers points to the continued strength of Byron studies in the next generation of American scholars. Next year’s panel, in Vancouver, will be organised by Matthew Borushko (Stonehill), with the topic ‘Byron Now’, and featuring talks by Jerome McGann (Virginia), Evan Gottleib (Oregon State), and Gary Dyer (Cleveland State).

In April 2014, the BSA supported a conference at Drew University entitled, ‘Collecting Byron’, on the occasion of the cataloguing of the Byron Society Collection, which has been donated to Drew to be made available to researchers. At the conference, which featured presentations by many BSA members, the Society hosted its annual Leslie Marchand Memorial Lecture, delivered this year by Alice Levine (Hoftstra) on the subject, ‘Selecting Byron’, in which she discussed her editorial work on Byron for the new Norton Critical Edition.

The BSA continues to emphasise connections to the rest of the global Byron community. We sent a number of delegates to the International Conferences at King’s College, London (2013) and Tblisi State University, Georgia (2014), as well as to the International Student Conferences in Messolonghi. In addition, in March 2014, the Messolonghi Byron Society hosted BSA President Andrew Stauffer for a performance of selections from Verdi’s Il Corsaro sung by members of the Greek National Opera. Before the concert, Stauffer gave an introductory address on Byron’s Corsair, and he was honoured along with David McClay (National Library of Scotland) after the performance. The Society continued to host Stauffer and McClay in the following days, and as they toured the Lord Byron exhibits at the Messolonghi Town Hall, they saw something intriguing in one of the display cases: an unknown address cover in Byron’s hand, sent to Augusta less than two weeks after his marriage to Annabella in 1815. After a phone call or two from Rosa Florou, the case was opened and the envelope examined: alas, no letter was inside, but it was still an exciting find.

Upcoming BSA events include a panel at the South Atlantic MLA Convention in Atlanta in November, organised by Lindsey Eckert (Georgia State) on the theme, ‘Creating and Sustaining Byron’ and a BSA panel at the 2015 NASSR conference at the University of Manitoba next November. Watch our website which will be updated frequently for updates, events, guest blog posts, and Byronic news of all kinds. We are excited about this new chapter in the history of the BSA.

• French Byron Society
• Olivier Feignier, President

In 2013, the French Byron Society lost one of its ‘historical members’. Thérèse Tessier, president of the French society for nearly twenty years, passed away in December. From 1981 to 2000, she transformed a group of scholars into a well-structured association, organised the...