News and Notes

The annual membership meeting was held May 4, 2018. Directors' meetings were held May 4, 2018 and October 19, 2018.

The members voted in several Directors for 2018-2021: Stuart Curran, Neil Fraistat, Sonia Hofkosh, and George Krupp. Tony Knerr resigned as a Director and was named an Honorary Member of the Board. Jonathan Mulrooney was voted in to serve the remainder of Tony's term, through May 2019.

Anna Mercer has been appointed Director of Communications.

Association Initiatives: Neil Fraistat, President of the Association, detailed efforts to scale up the organization, including 1) building up infrastructure for programming and public engagement; 2) increase programs, membership, and international participation through the Romantics 200 and Frankenreads initiatives; 3) increase support for early career and independent Romanticists; 4) expand beyond our primarily national scope; 5) bring the Journal into line with the Association's broader vision; and 6) build on recent fundraising successes to support this work.

We have established a physical archive for the Association at the New York Public Library and have built a virtual archive in Box. Eventually it will include past and present agendas and reports, made available publicly for members to read the history of the entire organization.

Events: In January, the Association hosted two 2018 MLA panels: Susan Wolfson organizing "2018 Reading 1818" with Susan Wolfson, William Galperin, and Frances Ferguson, speaking on Romantic-period anthologies, Jane Austen, and William Hazlitt respectively. The second panel, "South Asia and Romanticism," was co-sponsored with the Forum on South Asian Diasporic Literatures and presented more of a roundtable. Sonia Hofkosh and Gaura Narayan presided, and the speakers included primarily earlier career scholars (two graduate students, one associate professor, and two assistant professors: Narayan, Manu Chander, Yin Yuan, and Christopher Kelleher, with a response by Dan White). Kate Singer has organized a panel for MLA 2019 entitled, "Masks of Anarchy Now: Sites of Struggle" with Julie Carlson, Orianne Smith, Joselyn AlmeidaBeveridge, and Jeffrey Cox.

Jerrold Hogle and Anne Mellor hosted a symposium at the Huntington Library on "Frankenstein Then and Now" in May. A 2019 symposium will be held in Chicago and convened by Jonathan Gross on the bicentennial of Byron's Don Juan. Beyond the symposia, there has been seed funding for eighteen events, including three conferences in 2018: the Shelleys in Milan in April, Keats's Reading/Reading Keats in July at the Keats House in Hampstead, and Resistance in the Spirit of Romanticism at the University of Colorado in September 2018. 2019 events will include "Keats and Mythology (1819-2019)," organized by the Keats-Shelley Memorial Association in collaboration with the French Society of English Romanticism and hosted at the British School at Rome in February; and "Protest, politics and poetry: Peterloo at 200," organized by Jon Mee, Sharon Ruston, and a group of other colleagues and hosted at the University of York in March. Romantic Bicentennials has been made possible through the generous support of Liz and George Krupp and the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation.

Frankenreads took place on October 31, 2018 with Frankenreads week: a public series of films, readings, and other programming including lectures, symposia, talk backs to the public. The initiative had 650 partners and 600 participating institutions in forty-seven countries. The Library of Congress hosted its live-streamed readathon in its Main Reading Room, for the first time ever.

Keats-Shelley Journal News: Yasmin Solomonescu and Andrew Burkett were named Book Review Editors beginning with KSJ 2018, the final issue with Jeanne Moskal as Editor. The Journal has begun publishing reviews across media, including reviews of performances and museum exhibitions.

Jonathan Mulrooney has been named Editor beginning with the 2019 issue.

Anahid Nersessian and Emily Rohrbach have accepted invitations to join the KSJ Editorial Board.

Pforzheimer Grants: Doucet Fischer announced that the 2018 grants will support a research project by Beatrice Turner and a collaborative study by Olivia Loksing Moy and Marco Ramírez Rojas. Moy and Ramírez Rojas, Assistant Professors of English and Spanish respectively at Lehman College, CUNY, are the first scholars to receive a joint grant. Their...