Friday, October 24-25, 2024

• New York University, Palladium Hall 140 East 14th StreetNew York, NY, 10003United States (map)

The 2024 Curran Symposium, “Performing Politics,” will honor the bicentennial of Lord Byron’s death by engaging with some of the most pressing public issues in the lives of Byron and his contemporaries that carry through to our own turbulent lives in 2024. We take this moment to examine how such conflicts rage on “dubiously and fiercely,” and to consider how art reacts to and reimagines such acts of theatrics and turmoil (Sardanapalus, Act III.i.198).

This symposium will be one full day of panels and discussions, taking place on October 25th, 2024 at NYU’s Palladium Hall in New York City. The symposium festivities will also include a special production of Byron’s Sardanapalus at The Red Bull Theater (NYC) on Thursday, October 24th.

Staging Byron’s closet drama enables us to think about the difference between intentions for privacy, audience, and writing narratives of legacy. How might acts or performances (broadly conceived) help usimagine a new time and place? What are our stories of political transformation? And what does the actof going public, of sharing these stories, activate for us as citizens, scholars, and artists, those“unacknowledged legislators of the World” as Shelley famously put it?On the 25th, the symposium, which includes both in-person and virtual components, will feature invited speakers addressing a diverse range of performances and politics in the work of Byron and his Romantic contemporaries. During the evening’s drinks and appetizer reception, we will also feature a digital presentation of the artwork from the special creative project we have designed: “Uncloseting Byron”—a public art project that takes a creative, experimental approach to closet drama by using Byron as its starting point. Beginning with a line from one of Byron’s plays, participants create short mixed-media closet dramas and share them via social media. As we not only get off the stage but also off the page for this project, we tarry with how this act of performance might become a space of freedom. 

SCHEDULE

Thursday 24th 2024

7:30 pm         Sardanapalus at The Red Bull Theatre — Sheen Center

                       Post-show Talk-back to follow

Friday 25th 2024, NYU’s Palladium Hall

 8:45am – 9:15am             Coffee and Tea

 9:15am – 10:00am      Post-Sardanapalus Production Roundtable

Panelists: Omar F. Miranda (University of San Francisco) – moderator, James Armstrong (City College NY), Michael Gamer (U Penn)

10:00am – 10:15am         Coffee and Tea Break

10:15am – 11:30pm         Panel One: Poetics and Biopolitics, War, Incarceration

Chair: Arden Hegele (Columbia University)
Panelists: John Havard (Binghamton), Michael Demson (Sam Houston), Mariam Wassif  (Carnegie Mellon)

11:30am – 11:40am Coffee & Tea Break

11:40 am – 12:30 pm  Discussion: Byron and Gender Revisited

Panelists: Gerard Cohen-Vrignaud (University of Tennessee, Knoxville) and Kate Singer (Mount Holyoke College)

12:30 – 2pm                Lunch Break

2pm – 3:15pm             Panel Two: Politics of Performing the Future

Chair: Amal Bou Sleiman (International Association of Byron Societies)
Panelists: Emily Rohrbach (Durham, UK), David Sigler (Calgary), Marc Gotthardt (Cambridge U) 

3:15pm – 3:30pm        Break

3:30pm – 4:45pm        Panel Three: Our Everlasting Flame: Engaging with
Romanticism’s Enduring Foundations

Chair: Tom Mole(Durham University, UK)
Panelists: Elizabeth Denlinger (Pforzheimer Collection in the NYPL); Marsha Manns (BSA); Alice Levine (BSA); Andrew Stauffer (UVA); Jonathan Sachs (Concordia)

4:45pm – 5:45pm        Keynote

Chair: Alice Levine(Hofstra University)
Jerome McGann  (UVA)

5:45pm – 6:15pm        Closing Remarks by Kate Singer, Closet Drama & Commonplacing Showcase, Kaila Rose (Byron Society of America) and Olivia Moy (Lehman College, CUNY)

6:30pm – 8:30pm       

Reception at The Penny Farthing,
103 3rd Ave, New York, NY 10003

Celebrate Bacchanalia by joining us for drinks & appetizers!

                       

Register for the day here!

ADDITIONAL ACTIVITIES

On Wednesday 23rd October, 4pm EST, the Byron Society of America will be hosting the 14th Leslie A. Marchand Lecture at Drew University, organized by Marsha Manns. Dr. Tom Mole, Principal of Van Mildert College, Durham, will be giving a talk in Drew’s Special Collections Library, where the BSA archives are housed. The lecture will be followed by a reception and tour of the BSA’s Collection.

• Drew University, 36 Madison Ave, Madison, NJ 07940
• https://drew.edu/

HOTEL SUGGESTIONS

As we do not have an official hotel partner for the event, here are some suggestions of affordable options close to Union Square:

The Chelsea Inn: https://chelseainn.com/
The Heritage Hotel NYC: https://www.heritagehotelnyc.com/
Freehand Hotels: https://freehandhotels.com/
Union Square Apartments NYC: https://unionsquareapartmentsnyc.com/ 
East Village Hotel NYC: https://www.eastvillagehotelnyc.com/
The Holiday Inn: https://www.ihg.com/holidayinn/hotels/us/en/new-york/nycvc/hoteldetail?cm_mmc=GoogleMaps-_-HI-_-US-_-NYCVC
Broadway Plaza Hotel: https://www.broadwayplazahotel.com/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=business-listing

Happy to announce our MLA session for January 2025 in New Orleans:

“Transnational Byron”

Session Chair, Piya Pal-Lapinski, Associate Professor of English, Bowling Green State University

Byron’s experiences in Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean, including the global impact of his poetry, position him uniquely as a transnational figure. This panel explores transnational contexts in Byron’s work and discusses the significance of these interventions in an increasingly fractured global scenario which marks the current moment. Offering fresh interpretations of major works, the session focuses on topics such as Byron’s global celebrity; the way The Island frames political revolution in the context of the Columbian, Ecuadorian, and Greek revolts, creating spaces for new ideas related to progressive political communities, asylum and refugee discourse; Don Juan as an epic of child migration which engages with the nightmarish precarity of the migrant situation, from shipwreck and sexual exploitation to slavery; and the way Byron’s translating activity unsettles the idea of a national language/culture, drawing attention to difference and forging new coalitions.

Participants:

Mark Canuel, “Byron’s ‘Infant World,’” Professor of English, University of Illinois, Chicago

Omar Miranda, “Byron’s Global Celebrity,” Associate Professor of English, University of San Francisco

Jonathan Sachs, “Don Juan’s Migrant Children,” Professor of English, Concordia University, Montréal

Maria Schoina, “Byron as Translator,” Associate Professor, School of English, Faculty of Philosophy, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece

“Provocative and Provoking: Fifty Shades of Byron”

2024 marks the bicentenary of Lord Byron’s death. It is therefore fitting that the 2024 Newstead Abbey Byron Conference not only commemorates his death but also celebrates the life and works of both the multifaceted man and his dazzlingly diverse poetry. The theme for this year’s conference, “Provocative and Provoking: Fifty Shades of Byron” has been chosen to encourage papers exploring every aspect of Byron’s life, his poems, and his contemporary and current reception across the globe. 

KEYNOTE: Professor Andrew Stauffer (Virginia), “Byron: A Life in Ten Images.”

We could offer a lengthy list of potential topics, but it would be impossible to include them all. 

So instead, we invite you to join us and discuss your Byrons – the poet and the playwright, the lover and the misanthrope, the pacifist and the warleader, the atheist and the spiritualist, the witty correspondent and the shrewd satirist. We also invite you to share your insights and observations regarding Byron’s poems, the profound fluctuations in his popularity over the last two hundred years, and the enduring significance of the poet and his poetry for so many cultures and communities today.

The conference will be held in Newstead Abbey, and delegates will have the opportunity to tour the house and gardens during the conference. In addition, to mark this special occasion, we will also be expanding the conference to include additional cultural events, both in the Abbey and at nearby locations connected with Lord Byron and his family. Details will be made available later in the year once the events are finalised.

The deadline for the Call for Papers is the 2^nd of January. Please send abstracts of no more than 300 words, together with a short professional biography (of no more than 100 words), to Dr Emily Paterson Morgan (newsteadbyronconference@gmail.com).

The Byron Society will be providing a small number of bursaries for students and early career researchers. Details will be made available later in the year. If you would like to be considered for one of the bursaries, please include a short statement in your submission, outlining why you require the bursary.

Trinity College Cambridge will host a two-day event to coincide with the 200th anniversary of Lord Byron’s death on 19 April 1824, in Missolonghi, Greece. Byron was a student at Trinity College and is one of its most celebrated alumni.

While enrolled as an undergraduate, Byron published his collection of poetry, Hours of Idleness, and began the satirical poem that would become English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, a scathing provocation of the literary establishment.

Described by the College’s Senior Tutor as a ‘young man of tumultuous passions’, Byron soon became one of the most controversial, celebrated, and influential poets of his age. When Westminster Abbey declined to accept the magnificent statue of Byron, created after his death by the Danish sculptor Thorvaldsen, Trinity gave it a home in the Wren Library, where the poet still stands — an impressive presence for students, scholars and visitors.

But what kinds of presence does Byron have now? This question is the focus of an exciting programme of talks, readings, music and exhibited work, which will address, and mediate, the legacy and status of Byron now, within the contexts of today’s culture and scholarship.

The programme includes:

• Talks about Byron, by academics and writers including Jonathan Bate, Bernard Beatty, Drummond Bone, Clare Bucknell, Will Bowers, Mathelinda Nabugodi, Seamus Perry, Adam Phillips, Diego Saglia, Jane Stabler, A.E. Stallings, Andrew Stauffer, Michael Symmons Roberts, Corin Throsby, Clara Tuite, Ross Wilson.
• A concert featuring settings of Byron’s poems by Schumann, Wolf and others including Hugh Wood, and a newly commissioned piece composed by Judith Weir, the Master of the King’s Music and Honorary Fellow of Trinity.
• An exhibition in the Wren Library centred around Trinity College’s extensive Byron collection, including original manuscripts, letters and first editions of works by Byron and his circle.
• Poetry readings of newly commissioned work by various poets, as well as readings of Byron’s verse.

Further information including a full programme and booking information will be available soon at www.trin.cam.ac.uk To register your interest in attending, please email byron2024@trin.cam.ac.uk