We are pleased to announce the Keats-Shelley Association of America’s 2024 Curran Symposium, “Performing Politics,” a hybrid symposium in collaboration with the Byron Society of America, which will take place October 25, 2024 at NYU/Zoom, in New York City. This symposium, which honors the bicentennial of Lord Byron's death, engages 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. Times, both then and now, are punctuated by political turmoil, theatrical elections, and highly divisive cultural and intellectual realms. 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 (Sardanapalus, act iii. l. 198). How might acts or performances (broadly conceived) help us imagine a new time and place? What are our stories of political transformation? And what does the act of 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?

The symposium festivities begin on Thursday, October 24th, with a special production of Byron's Sardanapalus at The Red Bull Theater (NYC). Staging Byron's closet drama enables us to think about the difference between intentions for privacy, audience, and writing narratives of legacy. 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. In addition to traditional panels — one on “Poetics and Biopolitics,” another on the “Politics of Performing the Future” — the day includes a roundtable discussion on the production of Sardanapalus with Byron scholars and playwrights, and a special roundtable presentation (virtual and free to the public) on Romanticism and the public humanities by scholars who share their interpretations of what it means to do politically and publicly engaged work in this field. A keynote presentation is also planned. During the evening’s drinks and appetizer reception, we will also feature a digital presentation of the artwork from the special year-long 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 will 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 these acts of performance might become spaces of freedom.