The Shelley Conference 2024

Posthumous Poems, Posthumous Collaborations

Keats House Museum, London, 28-29 June 2024

Two years after the death of Percy Bysshe Shelley in the summer of 1822, Mary Shelley, after a painstaking editorial process, published Posthumous Poems (1824). The volume contained much of Shelley’s major poetry, including the hitherto unpublished ‘Julian and Maddalo’, together with translations of Goethe and Calderón, and unfinished compositions such as ‘The Triumph of Life’ and ‘Charles the First’. 

The Shelley Conference 2024 celebrates the first collected volume of Shelley’s poetry. Posthumous Poems is the product of collaborations. The most significant of these is between Mary Shelley as editor and Shelley as poet, but they also occur between Shelley and the guarantors of the volume, including Bryan Waller Procter (‘Barry Cornwall’) and Thomas Lovell Beddoes. The conference also addresses ideas of posterity and reception more generally in Shelley scholarship, the range of literary forms collected in a single volume, and the complex collaborative literary relationships that shaped Shelley’s life and endured after his death.

The conference will be held at Keats House Museum in Hampstead, London. Proposals should be in the form of 200-word abstracts for 15-minute papers. Please include a 100-word biography with your proposal.

Papers are invited on themes including, but not limited to:

●     Posthumous Poems, its texts and history

●     New readings of key poems and of Posthumous Poems as a collection

●     Mary Shelley as editor    

●     Posterity and futurity as themes in Shelley’s work

●     Texts in dialogue with Shelley’s work, particularly by those in his circle who survived him

●     Shelley’s engagement with Europe and European literature

●     The nature and limits of the collaborative process

●     Shelley’s reception outside of Britain or in languages other than English

●     Shelley and Byron

●     Shelley and piracy

Deadline: Please email proposals in Word to shelleyconference@gmail.com by Monday 29 January 2024.

Bursaries: Several bursaries will be available for postgraduate and early-career researchers presenting papers. Please visit the conference website for details. To apply, please add ‘Bursary’ to your email subject.

Keynote Speaker: Dr Ross Wilson (Cambridge)

Plenary Speakers: Professor Nora Crook (Anglia Ruskin); Dr Bysshe Inigo Coffey (Oxford);

Dr Madeleine Callaghan (Sheffield)

Pre-Conference Lecture (27 June): Professor Mark Sandy (Durham)

Conference Website: theshelleyconference.com / facebook.com/shelleyconference / Twitter: @shelleyconf

Conference Organisers: Dr Amanda Blake Davis (Derby); Dr Andrew Lacey (Lancaster); Dr Merrilees Roberts (QMUL);

Dr Paul Stephens (Oxford). Postgraduate Helpers: Lydia Shaw (Durham); Keerthi Vasishta (Durham).

Advisory Board: Dr Will Bowers (QMUL), Dr Bysshe Inigo Coffey (Oxford); Dr Anna Mercer (Cardiff);

Dr Mathelinda Nabugodi (UCL); Professor Michael Rossington (Newcastle).