Byron Society of America

The Byron Society of America has had an active year. We recently sponsored panels at several major conferences. At the 2014 convention of the South Atlantic Modern Language Association (SAMLA) in Atlanta, Georgia, on 8 November, Lindsey Eckert (Georgia State) chaired a panel entitled ‘Creating and Sustaining Byron’, which included papers by Jeffery Vail (Boston), Samantha Crain (San José State), and Michael Jones (Connecticut). The BSA’s panel at 2015 Modern Languages Association convention (Vancouver, BC, 10 January) was entitled ‘Byron Now’, organised by Matthew Borushko (Stonehill). It featured papers by Jerome McGann (Virginia), Evan Gottlieb (Oregon State), and Gary Dyer (Cleveland State), the full texts of which are available on the BSA homepage (http://byronsociety.org) under ‘Events’ and ‘MLA Convention Sessions’. At the 2015 North American Society for the Study of Romanticism (NASSR) conference in Winnipeg in August, Alexander Grammatikos (Carelton) organised the BSA’s panel ‘Lord Byron and Rights’. Joselyn Almeida-Beveridge (Massachusetts), Mark Lounibos (Finlandia), and Jacob Hughes (Penn State) presented papers.

Charles E. Robinson (Delaware) delivered the Society’s tenth Leslie Marchand Memorial Lecture at CUNY Graduate Center on 13 March 2015, under the title ‘Byron and Hazlitt: Inclining Their Ears Towards Each Other’, based on his forthcoming edition of Hazlitt’s letters. More recently, Julia Markus (Hofstra) gave the eleventh Marchand lecture, ‘Celebrating Lady Byron’s Life and Ada Lovelace’s Day’, on 16 October 2015, at Fordham University’s Lincoln Center Campus, an event co-sponsored by the NY Romantic Group under the leadership of John Bugg (Fordham). This talk was given to celebrate the publication of Professor Markus’s new biography, Lady Byron and Her Daughters (W.W. Norton), which appeared in October. Professor Markus will also lecture on her book at DePaul University in Chicago on 9 November, 6pm at Arts and Letters Hall, in an event co-sponsored by the DePaul Humanities Center and the Honors Program.

In 2015, Michael Edson (Wyoming) edited a collection in honour of the University of Delaware’s Donald H. Reiman, entitled Publishing, Editing, and Reception: Essays in Honor of Donald H. Reiman (Delaware, August 2015), available from Rowan and Littlefield. Contributors include: B.C. Barker-Benfield, Nora Crook, Stuart Curran, Hermione de Almeida, Doucet Devin Fischer, Neil Fraistat, David Greetham, Steven E. Jones, Alice Levine, Michael J. Neth, Michael O’Neill, Charles E. Robinson, and Timothy Webb.

2015 also saw the publication of Nature, Politics, and the Arts: Essays on Romantic Culture for Carl Woodring (University of Delaware Press, 2015), edited by Hermione de Almeida. The book includes John Clubbe’s ‘The Eroica in its Artistic Context: Willibrord Joseph Mahler’s Portrait of Beethoven’, ‘Dark Humor, Cartoon Strips, and Other Raw Material for Don Juan’, by Hermione de Almeida, ‘American Wilderness’, by Carl Woodring, and afterwords by Nina Auerbach, G. Thomas Tanselle, William Theodore de Bary, Donald H. Reiman, Anne K. Mellor, Carl Dawson, Marsha Manns, Regina Hewitt, Robert M. Ryan, and William Carl Gilpin.

This year, the BSA funded student travel to the International Association of Byron Society’s annual conference, held in Gdansk, Poland (3–6 July), and to the graduate student conference in Messolonghi, Greece (22–27 May, 2015). Grant recipients for Poland included Peter Francev (Mount San Antonio College); grant recipients for Messolonghi included Alexander Grammatikos (Carleton University), Samantha Crain (San Jose State University) and Alex Anderl (DePaul).

In 2016, Noah Comet (US Naval Academy) will moderate the BSA’s panel at MLA 2016 (Austin, TX, 8 January), ‘Byron and America’, at which he will also present a paper alongside Matt Sandler (Columbia), William Keach (Brown) and Susan Wolfson (Princeton).

In May 2016, in collaboration with the Keats-Shelley Association of America, the BSA will co-sponsor a one-day symposium at the New York Public Library devoted to the bicentennial of the Geneva Summer. Gillen D’Arcy Wood (Illinois) will give the keynote address as the BSA Leslie Marchand Lecturer for 2016. This will be the kick-off event in a multi-year sequence of Romantic Bicentennial events co-sponsored by the BSA and the K-SAA, with organisational help and participation from members of both societies.

Andrew Stauffer...