The International Byron Societies 2019
- The International Byron Societies 2019
- The Byron Society of America
In January 2019, the BSA sponsored its forty-sixth annual session at the Modern Language Association Convention in Chicago. Entitled '1819 in 2019', this roundtable panel was convened by Jonathan Sachs (Concordia) who presided over a lively discussion of the relevance of 1819 for our contemporary moment, with reference both to the events of 1819 in England and to James Chandler's foundational work, England in 1819. Speakers on the panel were Ian Duncan (Berkeley), Amanda Jo Goldstein (Berkeley), Deidre Lynch (Harvard), Josephine McDonagh (Chicago), and Jerome McGann (Virginia), with James Chandler (Chicago) responding. For MLA 2020 in Seattle, we are looking forward to another anniversary conversation on a panel entitled, 'Byron's Complete Poetical Works at Forty'. Michele Levy (Simon Fraser) will chair a conversation about the influence of Jerome McGann's edition and the future of editing in Byron. Speakers will be Lindsey Eckert (Florida State), Alice J. Levine (Hofstra), Adam McCune (Baylor), Jonathan Sachs (Concordia), and Andrew Stauffer (Virginia).
In October 2019, the BSA co-sponsored the annual Romantic Bicentennials Stuart Curran Symposium with the Keats-Shelley Association, entitled 'Don Juan at 200'. Organised by Jonathan Gross, the conference featured keynote lectures by Jerome McGann, Clara Tuite, Alice Levine, and Peter Graham. Offering talks by a blend of younger and established scholars, the conference converged for two days in Chicago at DePaul University and The Chicago History Museum. It brought together scholars from a wide range of backgrounds––Australia, Greece, and North America––to explore the origin of Byron's poem and its cultural value in the 21st century. Beyond the conference presentations, music was performed on Saturday, as the conference moved to the Chicago History Museum, founded in 1856, with its rich array of Chicago lore and an Art Deco theatre. Participants heard papers presented in a venue opposite the Art Institute of Chicago where Delacroix's 'The Combat of the Giaour and Hassan' is housed (Friday), and listened to Liszt, Chopin, and selections from Mozart's 'Don Giovanni' provided by the DePaul School of Music at the Chicago History Museum (Saturday).
Plans are being made for next year's Romantic Bicentennials Curran Symposium in celebration of Keats. Sonia Hofkosh, Deidre Lynch, and Jonathan Mulrooney are organizing events in Boston and Cambridge, MA. More information will be posted when available at the Romantic Bicentennials website (http://romantics200.org) and the BSA site (http://byronsociety.org).
The BSA awarded Student Travel Grants to Amelia Dirks (Chatham), Michael Damyanovich (Waterloo), and Jack Furth (Virginia Tech) to attend the 2019 Student [End Page 181] Byron Conference in Messolonghi. All gave excellent papers at that conference and also participated, in full traditional Greek costume, in a public celebration of Byron and his poetry in the town square. They read poems by Byron to a large audience of local citizens and honoured guests, accompanied by musicians and a dance performance. It was a wonderful conference, and one that demonstrated yet again how the power of Byron's life and work unites cultures and inspires new generations.
- French Byron Society
In the last two years, the members of the French Byron Society met five times. In February 2018, Arlette Sérullaz––after her entire professional life dedicated to Eugène Delacroix, his works, and his 'shrine-museum' in Paris––gave us an exhaustive account of Byron's impact on the painter's emotions, reactions to his readings captured in letters and diaries, and, of course, his paintings, and, in addition to the most famous works, she showed us several little-known drawings and sketches treasured at the Louvre Museum and elsewhere. This richly documented paper will soon be published in the Bulletin of our society. At the 2018 AGM, Paraskevi Nastou presented a witty portrait of Byron as painted by Stendhal, from their first encounter at the Teatro all Scala in Milan, to the poet's death in Missolonghi. During the autumn meeting, Nadine Feignier shared the impression of her recent visit to Newstead Abbey with the Byron Society of London, and I gave a brief account of the beautiful IABS...
