Presenters

in alphabetical order with affiliation and paper title

(we had an excellent group!)

Tobiah Agurkis

DePaul University, Chicago

“Tennyson and Imperial Britain’s Conception of Economy”

Tobiah Agurkis is a first-year Master’s student at DePaul University in Chicago, IL. She holds a Bachelor’s degree from North Park University, where she majored in Creative Writing. Her previous creative work is featured in The North Branch Literary and Fine Arts Journal, where she also served as senior editor for the 2021-2022 edition.

Jose Alvarez

Rutgers University, New Jersey

“‘XOXO, Lord Byron”

Jose Alvarez is a Brooklyn based film & theater writer, performer, producer and scholar. He is currently a PhD student in Comparative Literature at Rutgers University, and works in general management for the opera company ‘Mastervoices’. Notable work includes the queer cult classic Killer Unicorn distributed by Lionsgate, XoXo, Lord Byron which premiered at the New York Theater Festival, the upcoming production of Sondheim’s The Frogs at Lincoln Center, and numerous Broadway and off-Broadway productions in production capacities.

Bernard Beatty

University of Liverpool & School of Divinity at Saint Andrews, England

Plenary Participant

Bernard Beatty is Senior Fellow in the School of English at Liverpool University and Associate Fellow in  the School of Divinity at St Andrews University. From 1988-2005 he was Editor of The Byron Journal. He is the author of three books on Byron and has edited five collections of essays on him. He was awarded a Lifetime award for Byron Scholarship in Ravenna in 2017. He has written widely on Romanticism, Dryden, Rochester, Dickens, Newman, literary theory, the Bible, and theology. He plays the organ and lives in Chester, England.

Emily A. Bernhard Jackson

University of Exeter, England

“‘Hope You Guessed My Name’”: The Devil and the Making of Lord Byron

Emily Bernhard Jackson lectures and writes in 19th-century British Literature.  She has written a book on the development of Lord Byron's philosophy of knowledge and is currently at work on a second book that will examine the connection between medicine and history across the broad sweep of the 19th century, paying particular attention to authors' personal encounters with medicine. Dr. Bernhard Jackson was an Assistant Professor of English Literature at the University of Arkansas in the US from 2005 to 2011.  From 2009 to 2012 she worked at Cambridge University, teaching literature and writing skills.  As of January 2013 she is a lecturer in the English Department at Exeter University, specialising in 19th-century literature.

Madeleine Callaghan

University of Sheffield, England

“Byron as Others”

Madeleine Callaghan is Senior Lecturer in Romantic Literature at the University of Sheffield. Liverpool University Press published her first monograph, Shelley’s Living Artistry: The Poetry and Drama of Percy Bysshe Shelley, in 2017, and her monograph, The Poet-Hero in the Work of Byron and Shelley (2019) is published by Anthem Press. She
has published various articles and chapters on Romantic and post-Romantic poetry, and, with Michael O'Neill, co-authored The Romantic Poetry Handbook (2018). Her most recent book, Eternity in British Romantic Poetry (Liverpool University Press), came out in 2022.

Ioannes Chountis

University of Aberdeen, England

“Byron vs. Southey, or the Clash of Whig - Tory Historical Interpretations of George III’s Reign”

Ioannes Chountis is a PhD student in History at the University of Aberdeen. His research interest focus on Edmund Burke's thought and the reception of classical education and philosophy in the eighteenth-century. His interests also include Lord Byron’s politics. Ioannes’ research articles and book reviews have been published inter alia in the Journal of Eighteenth-Century Studies, The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought, and the Byron Journal. He is, also, the author of a book in Greek, Romanticism in Power. Aspects of Lord Byron's Political Opinions and His Participation to the Greek Revolution.  2022. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Classics and two master’s degrees in History and Political Philosophy.

Callan Cimino

University of San Francisco

Student Panel

Gerard Cohen-Vrignaud

University of Tennessee, Knoxville

Plenary: “Sex with Byron”

Professor Cohen-Vrignaud’s research focuses on Romanticism and its relation to political energies (revolutions, parliamentary reform, mass activism). His first book, Radical Orientalism: Rights, Reform, and Romanticism (Cambridge UP), reconsidered the crosscultural poetics of Byron, the Shelleys, and reformers in light of the liberal politics and economics shaking up Britain after the French Revolution. His current project, Generic Politics, examines how Romantic political life and social conflict were shaped by the genres and pleasures of literary and visual culture.

Samantha Crain

Independent Scholar

“Original Sin and Dystopia: Overreaching as Implicit Critique in Cain”

Samantha Crain got her PhD in English Literature December 2021 from the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. Her dissertation examines the improbable and its sources and significance in the novels of the Brontës. She’s passionate about the work and biography of Byron, and other research interests include folklore, and medieval literature. Her first publication, “Little Father Time: Hardy’s Changeling Child and the Limits of the Natural” appeared in the Hardy Society Journal (Spring 2019). Her second article, “Rehabilitated into a Critic: Byron’s Revelation of Cain” appeared in Religion and the Arts (Spring 2020). She has worked as a lecturer at UMN and is now an independent scholar. In addition, she writes fiction. Her first two published short stories appeared on Mythic Beast Studios, and she is regularly revising and submitting stories and working on a novel.

Gary Dyer

Cleveland State University, Ohio

“Reading Material Byron, Summer 1823”

Gary Dyer, Professor of English at Cleveland State University, studies late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British literature, book history, and relations between law and literature.  He is the author of British Satire and the Politics of Style, 1789-1832 (Cambridge UP), editor of Thomas Love Peacock’s Melincourt (1817), and his research appears in journals including PMLA and ELH. Dyer’s current research concentrates on the intersection of press prosecution and intellectual property. The book he is writing, Lord Byron on Trial: Literature and the Law in the Romantic Period, recounts and analyzes the poet Byron’s conflicts with the law in 1819-1824. 

Carolina Fautsch

John Hopkins University, Baltimore

“Echolocation in the Abyss of Byron's Cain”

Carolina Fautsch is a Ph.D candidate at Johns Hopkins who is interested in Global Romanticism, mythography, cognition, and the environmental humanities.

Peter Francev

Victor Valley College, California

“Teaching Byron in Community Colleges”

One of the IABS Joint Secretaries, Peter Francev is an Associate Professor and the English department chairperson at Victor Valley College in Southern California, where he teaches courses on composition and literature. When he is not teaching or researching, he enjoys spending time outdoors with his family either hiking or rock climbing.

Brian Goldberg

University of Minnesota, Minneapolis

“The Siege of Ismail, the Just War, and Don Juan’s Mental Fight”

Brian Goldberg is Associate Professor of English at the University of Minnesota. He is the author of The Lake Poets and Professional Identity (Cambridge UP 2007) and numerous essays on Romantic literature and culture.

Marc Gotthardt

University Cambridge, England

“Byron’s Speculative Utopias”

Marc Gotthardt is reading for a PhD in English at the University of Cambridge. His thesis on Byron’s poetics of events draws from Heideggerian and Derridean notions of temporality for inspiration in an attempt to ground an understanding of Byron as a serious thinker (not philosopher) of time and existence.

Chloe Green

University of San Francisco

Student Panel

Jonathan Gross

DePaul University, Chicago

“Byron, Pushkin, and the Harlem Renaissance”

Jonathan Gross teaches courses in English Romanticism, 19th Century Literature, and World Literature. He has edited novels, letters, and poems by aristocratic women of the Regency period, including Georgiana, duchess of Devonshire, Lady Melbourne, and Anne Damer. In 2014, he received a Fulbright to teach at Aristotle University, Thessaloniki, Greece and served as a Wicklander Fellow at DePaul (2014-2015). He is Joint-President of the International Association of Byron Societies and is the author of Byron: the Erotic Liberal. Publications include The Life of Anne Damer, editions of The Sylph (Northwestern, 2007), Belmour (Northwestern, 2012), and Emma, or the Unfortunate Attachment (2004), as well as Thomas Jefferson's Scrapbooks (Steerforth, 2006).

Robin Hammerman

Stevens Institute of Technology, New Jersey

“Strange New Worlds: Resurrecting Byron in AI Interfaces”

Robin Hammerman is Associate Professor of Literature and Humanities at Stevens Institute of Technology. Her research and teaching interests include the intersections of literature, science, and technology. She is the editor of Frankenstein and STEAM: Essays for Charles E. Robinson (Delaware UP, 2022) and co-editor with Andrew Russell of Ada’s Legacy: Cultures of Computing from the Victorian to the Digital Age (Association for Computing Machinery, 2015).

John Owen Havard

Binghamton University, USA

“‘Now new no more’: Byron’s Americas”

John Havard is Professor of English at Binghamton University. His recent books are Late Romanticism and the End of Politics: Byron, Mary Shelley and the Last Men (Cambridge University Press, April 2023) and the forthcoming Penguin edition of Mary Shelley’s The Last Man. 

Tony Howe

Birmingham City University, England

“Byron and the New World of Silence”

Dr. Anthony Howe is Reader in English Literature and Director of Graduate Research in the School of English at Birmingham City University. His first monograph, Byron and the Forms of Thought (Liverpool, 2013) has been described in the BARS Review as a ‘fine new study’, ‘well-written’, ‘full of insights’, and ‘combining a strong awareness of Byron’s various intellectual engagements with consistently persuasive interpretations of the poetry’. He was also co-editor, with Michael O’Neill, of The Oxford Handbook of Percy Bysshe Shelley, a major collection of essays that has become a key point of reference in Shelley studies. Dr. Howe is an advisory editor to the Byron Journal and an editorial board member of the Keats-Shelley Review.

Kathleen Jorge

Virginia Tech, Blacksburg

“Lord Byron’s Scandals and Contemporary Cancel Culture”

Kathleen Jorge is a second-year Master’s student at Virginia Tech. She received her BA in English Literature and Creative Writing from Virginia Tech as well. Her research interest is British Romanticism with a primary focus in Byron studies.

Johannah King-Slutzky

Columbia University, New York

“Geoengineering and the Capacity for Violence in Shelley’s Poetics of Soil”

Johannah King-Slutzky is a PhD candidate in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Her dissertation is on theories of limitless energy in transatlantic Romantic literature.

Celeste Langan

University of California, Berkeley

"Byron and Black Cantology"

Celeste Langan is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Romantic Vagrancy (1995) and essays on Scott, Coleridge, and Byron. Celeste’s recent research interests include romantic poetry, 19th century literature, Wordsworth, Carlyle, Hardy, Rousseau, the French revolution, literature and the social sciences, and Marxist theory.

Marcin Leszczyński

Comparative Studies of the Institute of Polish Literature at the University of Warsaw

"Byron and the New Science of Astronomy"

Marcin Leszczyński is Assistant Professor at the Department of Comparative Studies of the Institute of Polish Literature at the University of Warsaw. His research interests include Polish and English Romantic literature, comparative literary studies, comparative discourse studies, literature and science studies. Leszczyński is an author and editor of numerous works, including co-author, together with Peter Cochran, of the English translation of Canto I from “Voyage from Naples to Holy Land” by Juliusz Słowacki.

Alice Levine

Hofstra University, USA

Plenary Participant

Alice Levine is a Professor Emerita of English at Hofstra University. She received her PhD at the University of Chicago. Her research and publications have focused primarily on the work of Lord Byron and on the interrelations of poetry and music. She is the editor of Byron's Poetry and Prose, A Norton Critical Edition; is coeditor, with Jerome McGann, of Manuscripts of the Younger Romantics: A Facsimile of Manuscripts in the Pierpont Morgan Library, Volumes I-IV; and is one of the co-editors of the COVE online edition of Manfred. She is a director of the Byron Society of America and of the Keats-Shelley Association of America.

Julia Markus

Hofstra University, New York

“New Women, New World”

Julia Markus is a novelist and biographer whose last biography was Lady Byron and Her Daughters, published by Norton. She is Professor Emerita, former Director of Creative Writing at Hofstra University, and is on the Board of Directors of The Browning Society of America and the New York University Biography Seminar.

Omar F. Miranda

University of San Francisco, California

Co-Organizer

Dr. Omar F. Miranda is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of San Francisco. He is also Co-Vice President of the Keats-Shelley Association of America. Among his many contributions, Omar edited On the 200th Anniversary of Lord Byron's Manfred: Commemorative Essays (Romantic Circles), a collection of essays and resources dedicated to Byron’s poetic drama. He recently completed an open-access abridged teaching edition of Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (Romantic Circles). With Dr. Kate Singer (Mt. Holyoke College), he is co-editor of the forthcoming volume Percy Shelley for Our Times (Cambridge University Press). Omar has published many essays in European Romantic Review, Symbiosis, Keats-Shelley Journal, Romantic Circles, Studies in Romanticism, Global Nineteenth-Century Studies, and The Wordsworth Circle as well as book chapters in Byron in Context (ed. Clara Tuite, Cambridge University Press).

Mirosława Modrzewska

University of Gdańsk, Poland

“The World of the Future and the World of the Past in Selected Lyrical Poetry by G.G. Byron”

Mirosława Modrzewska is Professor and Director of English and American Studies at Gdańsk University, Poland. She was President of the Polish Society for the Study of European Romanticism from 2014-2022 and is now Vice-President. Modrzewska published extensively on the works of Romantics including Robert Burns, Lord Byron, Walter Scott, Juliusz Słowacki. Her most recent book, co-edited with Maria Fengler, is Byron: Reality, Fiction and Madness (Peter Lang, 2020).

Michelina Nelson-Olivieri

University of Denver, Colorado

“Queerly Byronic: Anne Lister, Lord Byron, and Queer Coding in the Nineteenth Century”

Małgorzata Nowak

Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań

“The End of the Old World: Juliusz Słowacki, Theodicy and Byronic Themes”

Małgorzata Nowak is a PhD candidate and Faculty of Polish and Classical Philology at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań. Her research is focused on the problem of evil in the Romantic era, comparative literature (mainly Polish and British Romanticism), the Romantic breakthrough, and the history and criticism of literary translation. She has published articles in numerous journals for Polish literary studies.

Naji Oueijan

Notre Dame University, Beirut

“The Byronic Hero and the American Settler”

A graduate of Baylor University, TX, USA (1985), Naji B. Oueijan (PhD) is Professor of English Literature at Notre Dame University, Lebanon. He is Joint President of the International Association of Byron Societies and member of several national and International literary societies. His research interests include Byronism, Orientalism, Romanticism, East-West Cultural Dialogue, and Lebanese-American Writers. His publications include 13 books and numerous articles published world-wide.

Piya Pal-Lapinski

Bowling Green State University, Ohio

“Coffee Amongst the Ruins of Anatolia: Hobhouse and Byron’s Journey to Ephesus”

Piya Pal-Lapinski is Associate Professor of English at Bowling Green State University and Joint Treasurer of the IABS. She is the author of The Exotic Woman in 19th Century British Fiction and Culture: A Reconsideration, 2005, and co-editor of Byron and the Politics of Freedom and Terror, Palgrave 2011. She is currently working on a book Istanbul and the Ottoman Empire in Romantic and Victorian Culture: The Sultan's City 1800-1922 to be published by Bloomsbury UK.

Daniela Paolini

Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina

“A New Arcadia: the Río de la Plata as a Utopian Space for Romantic Imagination (1806-1807)”

Daniela Paolini is a research fellow at the Instituto de Literatura Hispanoamericana of the Universidad de Buenos Aires, where she has taught classes on 19th Century Argentine Literature. Paolini’s research appears in a chapter of the book Territorio de sombras. Montajes y derives de lo gótico en la literatura Argentina (2021) and numerous journals, including a forthcoming issue of Zama (2023).

Frey Ramos Laforga

University of San Francisco

Student Panel

David Roessel

Stockton University, New Jersey

“Samuel Gridley Howe, Byron, and the Greek Revolution”

David Roessel is the author of In Byron’s Shadow: Modern Greece in English and American Literature. He is also the co-editor for The Selected Letters of Langston Hughes, The Collected Poems of Tennessee Williams, and most recently, of Lawrence Durrell’s novel The Placebo. He has been the Yiannos Professor of Greek Language and Literature at Stockton University since 2005 and is the Stockton coordinator for the partnership agreement with Aristotle University of Thessaloniki.

Kaila Rose

The Byron Society of America & Independent Scholar, Brooklyn

Kaila Rose has been part of the Byron community for the past ten years. While no longer affiliated with a university, her independent scholarship has been entirely devoted to Byron. With her appointment as Outreach Coordinator for the Byron Society of America in 2018, Rose brought the BSA into the world of social media and has now been a proud board member for the last two years. Besides the papers she presents at academic conferences and the short pieces she writes for the Byron Journal from time to time, most of Rose's work is in the form of poems and paintings. Her book, Unpleasant Angles, was published by Poetica Press in 2021, and she is working on another collection of poetry and essays, which will hopefully be out at the end of 2024. Organizing New Worlds has been the most important job of her life, and she looks forward to continuing such work for her entire career.

Jonathan Sachs

Concordia University , Montreal, Canada

Plenary Participant

Jonathan Sachs is Professor of English at Concordia University in Montreal. He is the co-editor (with Prof. Andrew Stauffer) of Lord Byron: Selected Writings, a new one-volume edition of Byron’s work forthcoming in the Oxford University Press series 21st-Century Authors. Sachs is also the author of The Poetics of Decline in British Romanticism (Cambridge, 2018), Romantic Antiquity: Rome in the British Imagination, 1789-1832 (Oxford, 2010), and, with the Multigraph Collective, Interacting with Print: Elements of Reading in the Era of Print Saturation (Chicago, 2018). In 2023-24, Sachs will be the M.H. Abrams Fellow at the National Humanities Center. He has previously held fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (2017-18) and the National Humanities Center (2014-15).

Mallory Shafer

University of San Francisco

Student Panel

Amal Bou Sleiman

Saint Joseph University and the Lebanese University, Beirut

“When the Outer becomes inner: The Shared Matrix in Byron’s Childe Harold Pilgrimage”

Amal Bou Sleiman is a Professor at the Saint Joseph University, Faculty of Medicine, and Lecturer at the Lebanese University, Faculty of Humanities, Beirut. Writing poetry is his passion and participating in conferences his priority. Amal has published and articles and proceedings in local and international journals and conferences, and has a book of poetry called The Fallen Mask.

Jake Spangler

Chicago PS

 “‘I could not deem myself a slave:’ Lord Byron and Greek Abolition in Don Juan”

Jake Spangler is a Literacy Instruction Support Leader (ISL) for Chicago Public Schools' Network 17, and a scholar of 19th century American and British literature, with an interest in transatlantic romantic studies, Romanticism, ecology studies, and ecocriticism. He holds a Masters in English from DePaul University, and a Masters of Teaching from Dominican University. Jake has been a lifelong fan of Byron, ironically, since he was told not to read the Poet’s work in a sophomore collegiate literature course.

Andrew Stauffer

University of Virginia, Charlottesville

Plenary Participant

Andrew M. Stauffer is Associate Professor of English at the University of Virginia and the President of the Byron Society of America. Andrew is the author of Anger, Revolution, and Romanticism, Book Traces: Nineteenth-Century Readers and the Future of the Library, co-author of Interacting with Print Elements of Reading in the Era of Print Saturation, and has published many articles on Romantic and Victorian poetry.

Fuson Wang

University of California, Riverside

“The Other Byron”

Fuson Wang is an assistant professor of English at the University of California, Riverside, where he is currently the co-director of the Medical and Health Humanities Studies program. He has published widely in British Romantic literature, disability studies, and medical humanities.

Stephen Webb

University of San Francisco, California

“A Very Curious Map” of Byron’s Books: Virtuality and Digital Approaches to a Byronic “book-map”

Stephen Webb is a PhD candidate and instructor in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta. He researches book history in the Romantic period, focusing on the reconstitution of Byron's library from digital surrogates and metadata to model Byron's dynamic bookish network.

Amy Weldon

Luther College in Decorah, Iowa

"‘Without the Muffle:’ Lord Byron, Boxing, and Authentic Life”

Amy Weldon is Professor of English at Luther College in Decorah, Iowa and author of The Hands-On Life: How to Wake Yourself Up and Save the World (2018), The Writer's Eye: Observation and Inspiration for Creative Writers (2018), Eldorado, Iowa: A Novel (2019), and Advanced Fiction: A Writer's Guide and Anthology (2023).

David Woodhouse

Treasurer, The Byron Society

“The grand Napoleon of the Realms of Rhyme: Byron's Egotistical Sublime”

David Woodhouse’s 1996 Cambridge Ph.D. thesis was titled Shades of Pope: Byron’s Development as a Satirist. His more recent literary criticism can be found in The Byron Journal, The Hazlitt Review and Prospettive su Byron. David edited Bernard Beatty’s Reading Byron (LUP, 2023). With John Leigh, he co-wrote the best-selling Football Lexicon (Faber, 2004). David’s latest monograph, Who Only Cricket Know: Hutton’s Men in the West Indies 1953/54 (Fairfield, 2021), is the first to win all four cricket Book of the Year awards (from the Cricket Society/MCC, the Cricket Writers’ Club, The Sunday Times and Wisden).