CATHERINE ADDISON (University of Zululand) – a fifth-generation South African, was a professor of English at the University of Zululand and is now a Research Fellow there. She completed a PhD on Byron at the University of British Columbia in the 1980s and has published not only on Byron and other Romantic, Renaissance and Modernist poets, but also on the verse-novel, poetic prosody, narrative, simile, colonialism and various African women writers.
“Generic Pilgrimages: Byron’s Verse-Novel and Its Posterity” This paper supports the contemporary argument that Don Juan is a novel in verse, offering a rationale as well as a history of this generic classification. Byron’s text was not by any means the first verse-novel in English, but it was unlike its predecessors and introduced a new subgenre. The Byronic verse-novel is typically voiced by an ironic, self-reflexive, digressive narrator and composed in complex stanzas whose structure provides some of its novelistic effects. The paper traces the posterity of this subgenre, of which the next significant member was Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, and to which living authors are still contributing.

YOUNG-OK AN (University of St. Thomas, Minnesota) – Professor of English. Her recent publications include “Rousing Sardanapalus” (in Studies in Romanticism, 2020), “Coleridge and Wonder” (The Wordsworth Circle, 2023), “The Color of Death and Racial Significations in The Last Man” (Norton Critical Edition, 2023) and “The Metapoetics of Freedom in Mary Shelley’s Valperga” (European Romantic Review, forthcoming).
“‘Why, when all perish, why must I remain?’: Dark Eternity in Heaven and Earth” As a pilgrim of eternity, Byron integrates a cosmic vision that is decidedly dark or even apocalyptic. In “Darkness,” Cain, and Heaven and Earth he interrogates the human species’ collective fate, a topic that is becoming increasingly urgent in our time: the extinction of the whole species. Whereas in Cain Byron addresses the original fratricide as the mark and burden of human destruction and violence, in Heaven and Earth he casts the daughters of Cain—Anah and Aholibamah—as bearers of Cain’s scar to carry out and actualize their destructive “destiny.” In our time when various catastrophes loom for a possible human extinction, Byron’s apocalyptic “dream, which was not all a dream” urgently demands us to ponder his vision of dark eternity.

AMAL BOU SLEIMAN (Saint Joseph University, Beirut) – professor in the Faculty of Medicine, and a lecturer at Lebanese University, Faculty of Humanities. He has published articles in local and international journals and a poetry book, The Fallen Mask.
“When Nietzsche Speaks Byron’s Language: The Eternal Recurrence in Byron’s Poetry” Like Byron, Friedrich Nietzsche is famous for his controversial works, satirical style, and dark humor. He was impressed by Byron’s poetry, thoughts, and characters, describing Byron as one of the “great poets”. Both had a rebellious spirit as they stood out against conventional social and political pieties and norms. Displayed in their texts, such a subversive path reflects their unique perspective on life, love, and society. I shall scrutinize Byron’s poem “The Prisoner of Chillon” to disclose the effect of his poetry on Nietzsche, mainly the latter’s belief in eternal recurrence, which is one of his most important conceptions. Relying on Nietzsche’s metaphysical and cosmological doctrines related to eternal recurrence to prove that even though there is continuous change in the world, it is incapable of eternally constructing new things. Hence, opposing wills to power win and lose discord in the same sequence resulting in an eternally recurring world

ROBIN BYRON, LORD BYRON – on leaving school followed the Poet’s footsteps to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he read history followed by law. He became a barrister and subsequently a solicitor specialising in maritime law. On his father’s death in 1989 he took his seat in the House of Lords, leaving when the reform of the House of Lords took place in 1999. He retired from legal practice in 2014. His novel, Echoes of a Life, was published in 2021.

JAMES ‘Jim’ CHANDLER (University of Chicago) – William B. Ogden Distinguished Service Professor, Department of English, Department of Cinema and Media Studies. Elected as Honorary Member of the Royal Irish Academy. Principal Investigator for “The Musical Pasts Consortium,” 2016-2020 (Mellon Foundation grant). Author of Doing Criticism: Across Literary and Screen Arts (Wiley-Blackwell, 2022), with Wordsworth and Edgeworth: Figures in a Field (in progress). Advisory Board, NINES Project for nineteenth-century literature and criticism on-line.
“Byron and Plato” Byron’s jocular comment, in the first canto of Don Juan, about how Plato’s “confounded fantasies” about love have paved the way to “immoral conduct” across the ages was written at about the same time that Shelley was translating one of Plato’s great dialogues about love, the Symposium. The joke may have been intended to debunk Shelley’s Platonic commitments. But it should not be taken as the last word on Byron’s complex relationship to Plato, or to Socrates (whom Byron had earlier called “Athena’s wisest son”) – nor to the complex role played by idealized forms in his poetry.

MEGAN COATES (Princeton University) – a PhD student specializing in Byzantine Art. She holds a BA in Classics from Stockton University, in Galloway, NJ. Before attending Stockton, Megan studied music at St. Augustine’s University in Raleigh, North Carolina. In November of 2017 her artwork was featured in an exhibition as part of the 25th bi-annual MGSA Symposium, held at Stockton’s Seaview Hotel and Resort. Her paintings were featured in an exhibition titled A Burden Lifted as part of the Politics of Space and Humanities conference along with the paper The Relevance of Langston Hughes and the Black Lives Matter Movement at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in December of 2017. Several of Megan’s pieces have also been included in Stockton’s literary journal Stockpot. Her monologue performances have been included in two releases of the Cadences literary journal in Nicosia, Cyprus. Megan’s previous performances include Don Juan at last year’s conference in San Francisco and The Prophecy of Dante in Ravenna, 2018.

MONIKA COGHEN (Jagiellonian University, Kraków) – faculty member at the Institute of English Studies. She has worked on British Romanticism and the reception of British Romantic literature in Poland. Recently she has co-edited two collections of essays: Romantic Dialogues and Afterlives and Nowe oblicza romantyzmu brytyjskiego: Eseje na dwusetlecie [New perspectives on British Romanticism: Bicentenary essays].
“Publishing Byron in Communist Poland: Juliusz Żuławski’s Editions of Byron’s Works” In the years 1953-1986 Juliusz Żuławski, writer and translator, published six editions of Byron’s poetry, which culminated in his three-volume edition of Byron’s selected works (Wybór dzieł, 1986). Żuławski mostly used Polish nineteenth-century translations, emending their texts if he judged it necessary, and providing explanatory annotations. He also translated several Byron’s works hitherto unavailable in Polish such as “The Curse of Minerva” and The Deformed Transformed. This paper aims at exploring the rationale behind Żuławski’s editorial choices, formed in the course of the debate on the role of Byron’s poetry in Communist Poland.

SAMANTHA CRAIN (independent scholar, USA) – has her PhD from the University of Minnesota and has published on Byron’s poetry and the novels of Charlotte Brontë and Thomas Hardy. Other interests include medieval literature and folklore. She is currently an independent scholar and works as a freelance editor and fiction writer, with several stories out in the last few years, including “Tacit” in Does it Have Pockets, “Hephaestus” in Aôthen Magazine, and most recently “Magic Mushroom” in Space & Time.
“Fragmentation in Childe Harold” In Childe Harold III, Wordsworthian nature is posed as the alternative to a teeming, petty humanity and Byron adapts Wordsworth’s nature poetics. Yet Byron’s narrator, pretending to misanthropy, cannot carry it off. Moreover, the poem’s form more fully mirrors its content when the narrator frequently interrupts or overwrites himself, simulating a consciousness in which awareness of time, of past, present, and future, creating mental fragmentation. This mental fragmentation corresponds with the uneasy relationship between the apparently sublime and pure landscapes the narrator seeks comfort in, and the human-populated ones that oppress him. Said fragmentation differs from the cheerfully satirical kind so characteristic of Don Juan: Harold’s narrator is not laughing, at the reader or anyone else.

WILLIAM DAVIS (Colorado College) – Professor of Comparative Literature and German. Most of his research has been in the areas of literary theory and Romanticism, investigating also connections between philosophy and literature. He has published in journals such as The Germanic Review, European Romantic Review, Essays in Romanticism, and The Byron Journal. His book, Romanticism, Hellenism, and the Philosophy of Nature appeared with Palgrave in 2018. In recent years, his work has focused primarily on Romantic Hellenism, including work on Byron and Greece.
“Byron as War Hero” During the Greek War of Independence, philhellenists deployed “Byron” as a signifier with a value that exceeded, or at times even diverged from, the embodied man—George Gordon, Lord Byron—to whom it ostensibly referred. This use of “Byron” as trope was intensified after his death in Messolonghi in April 1824. Although this deployment of the poet’s name was meant to garner support for the Greek War of Independence, it also constituted a literary fantasy that wished to cast Byron, the man, in the role of a Byronic hero, such as Alp, Conrad, or the Giaour.

VALERIE DOULTON – Founder and Artistic Director of The Live Literature Company for which she has staged Byron performances at Newstead Abbey, the National Portrait Gallery, & Melbourne House, Whitehall, UK, and Internationally at Monserrate Palace, Sintra, & Cafe Dante, Verona. Educationally she founded and runs in the UK a Drama Study Abroad programme for Niagara University, USA.
“Staging Byron” In this presentation Valerie will show images of her Live Literature Company stagings of “Byron the Poet” & “Byron in Love”, both written by distinguished Byronist Anne Fleming. Valerie will explore how these embodiments of Byron by actors in performance which she has directed, show the true Byron and his character as “Pilgrim of Eternity”. These plays are based on extracts from his writing from his youth to his death in Greece. Drawing from her own directing experience, Valerie will show how her stagings capture the quintessence of Byron and his metaphysical quest throughout his life.

GUÐNI ELÍSSON (University of Iceland) – professor of literature and founder of the climate project Earth101, in which many of the world’s leading climate scientists have participated. Ljósgildran (The Light Trap) is his first novel. It was shortlisted for the 2021 Icelandic Literature Prize and the 2023 Nordic Council Literature Prize. His second novel, Brimhólar (The Breakers), was published the following year. He is at the moment working on his third novel called Ithaca.
“Byron and the Art of Dying” The presentation will focus on speculations about Byron’s death that started long before April 1824. They are different from those that followed his death, for their primary concern is to cast doubts upon the consistency of Byron’s character by emphasizing the conventional repentance of a dying libertine. On his deathbed, Byron was forced to respond to these allegations and conduct his own ars moriendi. His comments show that he understood the tensions that could be established between true emotional transcendence and the drama of acting one’s feelings out. He attempts to show that he is not a cold, heartless atheist but a sentimental and sympathetic hero of a new era.

AURICÉLIO SOARES FERNANDES (State University of Paraíba) – Assistant Professor, teaching courses in Anglophone Literatures, Literature and Film and Comparative Literature. He also researches on the Gothic, Romanticism and TV adaptations from literature and Intermediality.
“New Byronic Heroes in TV Shows: Comparing Male Characters in Taboo and Bridgerton” Nineteenth-century Byronic characters build their own laws and refuse to obey authority and conventional values. They are loners, moody, arrogant and relentless too. However, the so-called new Byronic characters present a traumatic past which can justify their actions through narrative development as well as appearing to seek for redemption. This is perceptible in the streaming shows Taboo (2017) and Bridgerton (2020 – present) in which the characters James Keziah Delaney and Count Simon Basset play contemporary Byronic heroes. It will be discussed how both characters retain major elements from Lord Byron’s poetical works but also are rehumanized and reimagined for contemporary audiences.

JOHN GATTON (Bellarmine University) – Professor Emeritus of English, has taught classes in Early British Literature, Modern Drama, Vampire Literature, Byron, and Shakespeare, and directed eleven plays for the Theatre Program. He acted with the Kentucky Shakespeare Festival and with companies in South America, Dublin, and Paris. He is the Treasurer of The Byron Society of America.
“Byron, Pilgrim Among the Shades” In poetry and prose, Byron blended his affinities for graves and battlefields, transforming his accounts of visits to Morat and Waterloo into secular versions of medieval pilgrimages to saints’ tombs and relics and himself into a pilgrim among the dead. Missolonghi’s Garden of Heroes is a place of pilgrimage, as is its statue of Byron. Further connecting him to the dead there is the jar, buried in the statue’s foundation, containing one of his lungs.

GIORGOS GIANNIKOS (University of the Peloponnese) lives in Kalamata, Messinia and works as a teacher in a primary school. He is a PhD candidate in Social and Educational Policy at the University of the Peloponnese and holds a Master’s degree in Historical Research and Didactics. He is an author and administrator of the website “Philhellenes of History” which studies the Philhellenic movement of the 18th and 19th centuries.
“The Death of Lord Byron in the English-Language Press of Canada in 1824” This study aims to examine the way in which Lord Byron’s death was covered by English-language newspapers in Canada during 1824. Four Canadian newspapers from 3 different regions were studied for the purpose of the research. Lord Byron’s death was an event that received considerable press attention. News of the burial of the glorious philhellene poet, articles on his life and work, and poems dedicated to his memory were published. The findings of the research prove that in Canada there was a strong interest in the demise of Lord Byron, which was also linked to the revolutionary developments in Greece at that time.

MARC GOTTHARDT (University of Cambridge) – PhD candidate at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, where his thesis has been concerned with Byron’s poetics of events. He works for The Byron Society (London) as Society Coordinator, and at Trinity College, Cambridge, as a research assistant. For the latter, he is researching and assisting with cataloguing the William St Clair collection of piracies and Byroniana, as well as co-editing a volume of bicentenary perspectives on Byron.
“Bound to Last? Byronic Piracies” This paper explores the double provocation of literary piracy, that is, the challenge it poses to both the carefully managed literary establishment and the no less carefully managed idea of Romantic authorship. It aims to explore a particular tension between ephemeral materiality and the perdurance of the written word. Piracies, institutionally marginalised and cheaply produced, are ephemera almost by definition, of little value to collectors and not bound to stand the test of time. For a writer like Byron, however, they testified to—and boosted—his popularity, so that in some way, literary longevity depended on illicit dissemination.

PETER GRAHAM (Virginia Tech) – Professor Emeritus of English, Director of International Relations for the Messolonghi Byron Research Center, former President and current Vice President of the Byron Society of America. He has published and lectured on British literature and culture, with particular focus on Lord Byron, Jane Austen, and Charles Darwin, as well as on medical humanities.

ALEXANDER GRAMMATIKOS (Langara College) – Instructor in the English Department at Langara College (on the unceded traditional territory of the Musqueam [mus-kwee-um] People; Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada). His research interests include British Romanticism, early Greek statehood, and of course, Lord Byron. Alex’s publications include British Romantic Literature and the Emerging Modern Greek Nation (2018) and the forthcoming collective volume Byron and Translation (2024), which he has co-edited with Maria Schoina (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki).
“Marketing Byron’s Hellenic Legacy: Greek and British-Greek Advertisements in The Byron Journal” This paper examines the many Greek and British-Greek advertisements that appear in The Byron Journal, which in the first 20 years of the journal account for approximately 30% of advertising. My paper draws on the work of Harold Nicolson (Byron: The Last Journey) and Christine Kenyon Jones (ed. Byron: The Image of the Poet), among others, in examining why Greek and British-Greek companies thought The Byron Journal was an ideal venue for their advertisements. The Greek and Greek-British advertisements in The Byron Journal reveal much about the contemporary relationship between Greece and Byron (and Greece and the UK), including how Greeks have drawn upon Byron’s ‘Hellenic legacy’ in order to market the country to English-speaking audiences (in the case of the journal, us Byronists).

JONATHAN GROSS (DePaul University) – author of Byron: The Erotic Liberal. He has edited Byron’s “Corbeau Blanc”: the Life and Letters of Lady Melbourne, and is completing a study entitled The European Byron: Mobility, Cosmopolitanism, and Chameleon Poetry (Anthem, 2025).
“Choosing the Moment of One’s Death: Byron, Pushkin, Mickiewicz” My essay contrasts two poets’ reactions to Byron’s death in Missolonghi. The first is Alexander Pushkin, who wrote “André Chénier” and “Ode to the Sea”. I close by considering Adam Mickiewicz’s “Books of the Polish Nation and Its Pilgrimage”. Byron, Pushkin, and Mickiewicz encourage us to consider the commemoration of poetic martyrs and the causes for which they chose to lay down their lives.

TALA EL HALABI (Beirut Arab University) – graduate student, pursuing a Master’s Degree in English Literature. Within the prestigious Human Sciences Department, she is conducting scholarly research that explores the intersections of Eastern and Western literary traditions, with a particular focus on the works of Lord Byron and their cross-cultural significance.
“The Dichotomy of the Nightingale and the Rose: Eastern Influence on Selected Works of Lord Byron” In his poetic works, Lord Byron bridged the divide between East and West, drawing on Eastern customs, characters, and myths to create a profound cross-cultural dialogue. One such example is his incorporation of the nightingale and rose symbolism, a powerful Eastern motif representing love and the human experience. Through a deep exploration of this imagery across his literary corpus and a comparison to the works of Hafiz, Jami, and Rumi, this paper highlights Byron’s role as a conduit, unifying the seemingly disparate worlds of East and West under the universal language of love and shared humanity.

JOHN OWEN HAVARD (State University of New York at Binghamton) – Professor of English. His recent books are Late Romanticism and the End of Politics: Byron, Mary Shelley, and the Last Men (Cambridge, 2023) and an edition of Mary Shelley’s The Last Man with a foreword by Rebecca Solnit (Penguin, 2024).
“Byron the American” This paper builds upon my presentation at the “Byron at 200” roundtable at the MLA Convention, which revolved around an imagined letter from Byron to Hobhouse sent from Philadelphia in January 1824.

ARISTIDES N. HATZIS (National and Kapodistrian University of Athens) – Professor of Philosophy of Law and Theory of Institutions and Director of the Laboratory of Political and Institutional Theory and the History of Ideas at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science.
“Byron on Liberalism” Shortly before Byron’s death he had a heated debate with Col. Leicester Stanhope regarding control of the revolutionary newspaper Greek Chronicles. Their debate touched on the broader question of the limits of press freedom during war. Stanhope accused Byron of illiberalism, and Byron derided Stanhope’s utilitarian version of liberalism. The concept of liberalism was still in development in 1824, and the word was rarely used. Although many radicals across Europe identified themselves as liberals (liberaux, liberales, liberali, Liberalen, and fileleutheroi) a coherent ideology was still being constructed. Byron considered himself a liberal, but differently from Stanhope, Blaquiere, Bowring, Bentham, Hunt, Hobhouse, Mavrokordatos, or Percy Shelley. Only Mary Shelley provided a comprehensive definition of liberalism that remains relevant today. Using her definition, we will explore competing concepts of liberalism during an era dominated by classical republican ideals, situating Byron’s political views within this early liberal spectrum.

MIRKA HOROVA (Charles University, Prague) – Senior Lecturer in English in the Department of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures. Editor of The Byron Journal and has published widely on Byron, from heroic transformation (Routledge, 2016), Italian dramas (MUP, 2017), Lucretian elements (CSP, 2018), the Satanic School (CUP, 2019), and swimming (LUP, 2019), to chapters on dramatic experimentation in the Cambridge Companion to Byron (2023) and the metaphysical dramas in the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Lord Byron (2024). She is an Advisory Board member of the ICR and the IABS.
“The Game of Life: Byron and Burgess’s Byrne” Byron’s keen exploration of reading life as a game pursues representation in a fittingly feisty poetic idiom throughout the ever-versatile Don Juan. Anthony Burgess’s last work, the verse novel Byrne (1995), riffs off the Byronic ottava rima, executed with a typically Burgessian panache for irreverent hyperbole in this telling of a “hero’s” life via caustic commentary on life in general. Read together, Don Juan and Byrne offer a series of key insights on heterogeneity, the sustainability of poetic form, and the legacy of philosophical and political commentary in a comic mode, while also testing the ostensible limits of the transgressive.

DREW HUBBELL (Susquehanna University, Pennsylvania) heads the Environmental Studies program. Author of Byron’s Nature: A Romantic Vision of Cultural Ecology (Palgrave 2017) and co-author of Introduction to Environmental Humanities (Routledge 2021). An expanded version of his conference paper will be published in Literature and Science in the 19th Century (ed. Pamela Gilbert, Palgrave, forthcoming).
“‘When cash rules the grove’: Romantic Literature and the Hegemonic Alliance of Science, Capitalism, Empire” Lord Byron’s quip “When cash rules the grove” mocks the hegemonic alliance of capitalism, imperialism, and science. It is dramatized in two main episodes of Don Juan (1818-1823): first, during Juan’s tour of London and then in his residence at Norman Abbey. The former introduces concepts and perspectives that will become crucial to environmental justice movements; the latter turns the Regency fad for modernizing country estates into a synecdoche for how imperial science terraforms Earth. These episodes show how, even as imperial Britain enlisted science and capitalism to dominate the world, the negative externalities from their bioengineering “improvements” were marshalled in counterhegemonic critique.

SEAN JONES (University of South Florida) – recently graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in Literary Studies and has been preparing to apply to Law School. In the meantime, he has become immersed in the world of nineteenth-century literature, deepening the foundation he developed as an undergraduate.
“The Byronic Hero from Childe Harold to Contemporary Literature” From the time of Childe Harold to the modern-day love affair with Edward Cullen, the fascination of literature and film with Byronic heroes spans across the last two centuries. Questions about why Byron has captivated generations of authors, what in the personal details of Byron’s life make for a heroic avatar, and what he contributed by way of writing to the heroic form will be discussed along with the implications surrounding our fascination with Byron and what that says about our fantasies. The paper will also discuss Byron’s influence on women authors and his continuing influence in contemporary literature.

MARIA KALINOWSKA (University of Warsaw) – professor and author of many books and articles on Polish Romanticism, Philhellenism, the travelogue in Greece, and the Romantic reception of Greek culture. In 2020 she was awarded a Lord Byron Medal by the Society of Hellenism and Philhellenism in Athens.
“The Image of Byron’s Death in Polish Literature” Byron had an enormous influence on Polish Romanticism, and the reception of his life and work was exceptionally intensive, rich and multifaceted in Polish literature. It was not only Byron’s fight for and commitment to the cause of Greece’s independence that garnered interest in Poland. Byron’s death became an important motif of Polish literature from Romanticism onwards. The paper discusses Romantic and post-Romantic images of his death, particularly the way they tie in with Romantic literature’s “hero’s death” topos, though also the way in which they are incorporated into wider and more diverse historiosophical, existential, and political interpretive contexts.

PANOS KARAGIORGOS (Ionian University) – Professor Emeritus and former professor of English, Ionian University, Translation Department, Corfu. He earned his PhD from the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham. He has written over 50 books, four of which have been published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing and one in Japan.
“Greek Poems Inspired by Byron’s Death” Byron’s death shocked not only the inhabitants of Messolonghi, who had received him as an “angel – liberator”, but of all Greece. After this sad event, a dirge was composed by an anonymous versifier and travelled from mouth to mouth. More than a dozen eminent Greek poets followed. Among them his contemporaries Dionysios Solomos, Andreas Calvos and Angelica Palli, each contributing long, moving odes. However, the poet who excelled was Costis Palamas; he published three poems and more essays, in which he introduced the term ‘Byronolatry’. Extracts of all these poems are given both in the original and in translation.

CHRISTINE KENYON JONES (King’s College London) – writer and lecturer, and a Research Fellow in the Department of English. Her books on Byron include Dangerous to Show: Byron and His Portraits, with Geoffrey Bond (2021), and Jane Austen and Lord Byron: Regency Relations, published by Bloomsbury in February this year.
“‘The Pilgrim of Eternity’: A Temporary Response” This talk seeks to unpack Shelley’s well-known characterisation of Byron in ‘Adonais’ (1821); to discuss how appropriate or otherwise it was as a description of Byron and his response to Keats’s death, and to debate whether it continues to provide a useful image of Byron for the twenty-first century. It explores Shelley’s and Byron’s conceptions of ‘pilgrims’ and ‘pilgrimages’ and reviews their respective interpretations of ‘eternity’ within the context of their differing ideologies.

GREG KUCICH (Notre Dame University, USA) – Professor of English and a Fellow of the Nanovic Institute for European Studies. His publications focus on British Romantic era writing, theatre, and politics, including studies of women’s historiography, the politics of theatrical performance, Cockney culture and poetics in the Keats-Hunt Circle, Spenser’s impact on British Romanticism, and Keats’s reception history. Most recently, he has published, with Beth Lau and Daniel Johnson, a digital edition of Keats’s annotations and markings of Paradise Lost and a companion print volume on Keats’s Reading / Reading Keats. He is co-organizing with Jeffrey Cox a Byron Bicentennial Symposium in Rome this month, which will issue in a collection of essays by various luminaries in Byron Studies. Last year he received a “Distinguished Scholar Award” for lifetime achievement by the Keats-Shelley Association of America.
“Byron and Leigh Hunt: Unlikely Co-Pilgrims of Eternity” The personal and poetical relationship between Byron and Leigh Hunt has been extensively examined throughout the last several generations, especially more recently in relation to Byron’s distinctive, though somewhat peripheral involvement in what has come to be known as Hunt’s “Cockney Coterie” (Roe, Cox, Kucich). Our general understanding of this affiliation charts a long but ultimately declining history from admiring association to intense pique, if not furor, and alienation on Byron’s part corresponding to near adoration by Hunt moving to postulated camaraderie, especially on The Liberal, but followed in the end by fierce dispute, personal recrimination, and the ill-advised (for Hunt) admonitions of Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries. I intend to complicate this trajectory by focusing on several key, understudied modes of compositional, poetic interaction between Hunt and Byron, particularly their shared work on the composition of Hunt’s controversial, politically radical work The Story of Rimini. The paper will draw on Hunt’s little-studied draft manuscripts of the poem (British Library) containing many interpositions in Byron’s hand. Tracking the complex ways in which Hunt helped shape the idiosyncratic poetic formulations of “The Pilgrim of Eternity” in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and Don Juan can open up striking new insights on the aesthetic and political priorities of Byron’s major, long poems.

FLORA LISICA (Northeastern University, London) – Assistant Professor. She recently completed her PhD on Romantic literature at the University of Cambridge, and has published on Mary Shelley and John Keats.
“Fragmentation and Closure in Byron’s The Giaour (1813)” This paper reads The Giaour’s formal and narrative fragmentation in the context of contemporary interests in Gothic fictions and architectural ruins. Tracing the way that Byron employs and subverts the conventions of the Gothic mode in the poem, it explores how different kinds of fragmentation complicate the reader’s ability to reach moral and narrative certainty and closure. Parallels were drawn between Byron and the Giaour in Byron’s lifetime, and the paper also reflects on the relationship between the poem’s insistent ambiguity and Byron’s authorial self-fashioning.

JOHN LYTTON, EARL OF LYTTON – born 1950 Minehead, Somerset, UK and brought up on Exmoor; educated at Downside School and University of Reading’s College of Estate Management; professional career as a Fellow of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors: initially in the public sector then in private practice. As parliamentarian, he first sat in the House of Lords by succession to his father in 1985, departing in 1999 and then returning as elected hereditary peer in 2011. Sits as independent crossbench peer. Great-great-great grandson of George Gordon, 6th Lord Byron through his daughter Ada, granddaughter Anne Blunt and great-granddaughter Judith Baroness Wentworth. Former president of the Newstead Abbey Byron Society (now dissolved) and vice president of The Byron Society, London. Honorary president of the Messolonghi Byron Society. Other famous ancestors include Robert Lytton, Viceroy of India 1885 and Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, Arabist, political campaigner, diarist and poet.

ELIAS KOLOVOS (University of Crete) with ANNE MCCABE (University of Oxford) – Elias is Professor of Ottoman History, Department of History and Archaeology. He is an expert in Ottoman Turkish palaeography and he is working with Ottoman archives in Turkey and Greece (including Mount Athos and Patmos). His research focuses on the economic history of the Mediterranean, the history of insular worlds, the history of frontiers, rural and environmental history, as well as the spatial history and legacies of the Ottoman Empire.
“Passport to Immortality: Lord Byron’s Firman from Sultan Mahmud II for a Grand Tour/Seyâhat in the Ottoman Empire (1810-11)” Presenting an unpublished document relating to Byron; a firman of Sultan Mahmud II, 1810, in response to a petition by Ambassador Robert Adair, granting permission to Byron and Hobhouse to travel (ziyâret) from Constantinople to the Morea, Salonica, Athens, the White Sea (Aegean), Smyrna, Aydin, and Old Istanbul. Compared with a similar, unused, firman, of 1811 for Byron to travel to Cyprus, Acre, Jerusalem, Damascus, Egypt and back to the capital. Both documents follow the template of the Ottoman chancery, noting aristocratic status, emphasizing cordial relations between the two states, listing the destinations of the Orientalist Grand Tour in Turkish, and making provision for the safety, well-being, and freedom from taxation of the travellers and their retinue. Mahmud II could scarcely have imagined, when he granted these privileges to Byron, that he would subsequently become a key figure in the rebellion against his rule.

MACKENZIE KORNBLUTH (Stockton University) with DAVID ROESSEL, is a junior at Stockton majoring in Archaeology. She has excavated in Albania and will spend a semester at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in the coming academic year.

LUDMILLA KOSTOVA (“St. Cyril and St. Methodius” University of Veliko Tarnovo, Bulgaria) – Professor of British literature and cultural studies. She has published extensively on eighteenth-century, Romantic, and modern British literature, as well as on travel writing and representations of intercultural encounters. Kostova is Editor of the peer-reviewed journal VTU Review: Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences.
“‘A depth of feeling and a vigour of imagination, which Lord Byron could not excel’: Thomas Hope’s Anastasius and Byron’s Public Image in the Early Nineteenth Century Published anonymously in 1819, Anastasius, or Memoirs of a Greek turned into one of the literary sensations of the 1820s. Because the book projected an authentic image of life and politics in the Ottoman Empire and focused on an anti-hero of controversial morality, at least two of its authoritative readers, Sydney Smith of the Edinburgh Review and Christopher North of Blackwood’s Magazine, suggested that it had been written by Byron. However, the author of Anastasius was Thomas Hope, a wealthy dilettante of Dutch-Scottish descent. My paper will examine Byron’s public image as revealed in Smith’s and North’s reviews of Anastasius and will attempt to determine to what extent Hope’s central character may be viewed as a “Byronic hero”.

MARCIN LESZCZYŃSKI (University of Warsaw) – assistant professor at the Institute of Polish Literature. His research interests include Polish and English Romantic literature, comparative literary studies, and literature and science studies.
“Cain: The Pilgrim of Eternity and Infinity. Astronomical Deep Space and Geological Deep Time in Byron’s Drama” In Cain, Byron explores scientific concepts of time and space in the context of eternity and infinity. Astronomy and, to a certain extent, geology transform the abstract mathematical concept of infinity into an actual reality. They stretch Cain’s mind to comprehend a recently discovered boundless universe, guiding him on a journey from the closed world to the infinite universe. Byron seeks a language to depict something boundless, perhaps without beginning or end. He conveys the concept of cosmic infinity through images of a shoreless ocean, associating Cain with Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. Simultaneously, Byron plays with the established idea that grappling with infinity can induce madness, acknowledging the fragility of the human mind when contemplating infinity.

FLORA KA YU MAK (Chinese University of Hong Kong) – part-time lecturer in the Department of English. Her PhD thesis title is “Literary Impersonality: Eliot, Wordsworth, Byron, and Keats”.
“‘Fiery Dust’ Reprised: The Contemporary Relevance of Byronic Heroism” On his 36th birthday, Byron sought solace in the idea of a glorious death on the battlefield for the independence of Greece, which contradicts with the deep disillusionment he expressed towards the heroic figures of his days in Don Juan and reflects his insistent pursuit of the heroic ideal for himself. This paper aims to evaluate the extent of relevance of Byronic heroism to our post-modern, globalized reality, by drawing on recent academic discourse about heroism and several most influential fictional heroes and heroines such as Elsa from Disney’s Frozen (2013) and Batman from Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight (2008).

MARSHA MANNS EVANS (Co-Founder, Byron Society of America and Byron Society Collection) founded the Byron Society of America (1973) and the Byron Society Collection (1995) with Leslie A. Marchand. She served as the Society’s founding executive director for twenty-one years and its chair for fourteen years. Currently she co-chairs the Byron Society Collection’s Joint Advisory Committee at Drew University Libraries.
“‘No, I am not through with Byron’: Leslie Marchand on the Significance of the International Byron Society” “The happiest thing,” Leslie Marchand wrote in the millennial issue of The Byron Journal, “for the spread of Byron’s reputation has been the Byron Society, which started in England and has spread throughout the civilized world”. This paper will draw upon a host of unpublished materials by Leslie A. Marchand, including his memoirs, to demonstrate that Byron’s biographer and editor staunchly believed that the Byron Society could and should take the leading role in creating and sustaining interest in Byron well into the 21st century.

ANNE MCCABE (University of Oxford) with ELIAS KOLOVOS (University of Crete) –Anne is Research Associate at the Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents. She has worked on Byzantine manuscripts (particularly of technical treatises on agriculture and medicine) and inscriptions (particularly those of Constantinople and its hinterland), as well as on the excavations of the Athenian Agora with the American School of Classical Studies, and at Al-Andarin in Syria.

DAVID McCLAY (University of Edinburgh) – Independent scholar, former IABS joint-Treasurer and Senior Curator of the John Murray Archives and Byron Papers at the National Library of Scotland. Current Honorary Secretary of the Edinburgh Sir Walter Scott Society and Byron Society member.

INNES MERABISHVILI (Tbilisi State University, Georgia) – Professor in the Chair of Translatology, and Academician of the Georgian National Academy of Sciences. She is the author of over 20 books and monographs including publications on Lord Byron. In 1988 she established the Byron Society of Georgia and in 1995 the Byron School of Tbilisi.
“‘Maid of Athens’ and Studies on Byron and Georgia.” In 1995 I visited the British Museum Library in search of a book on Lord Byron, anonymously published in London, in 1825, knowing from a comment that it comprised a story of Byron’s encounter with a Georgian slave girl in the East. I decided to obtain an original copy. The copy arrived but with a miraculous inscription that it had belonged to Teresa Macri, the famous Maid of Athens. Having strongly believed that the heavenly-sent copy would be of good omen, I plunged into a thorough study of the special episode. The paper argues that the story seems true and the Georgian slave girl is the prototype of the mystical Thyrza.

MILTIADIS MICHALAKAKIS (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki) studied Classical Philology (BA Philology: Classics, MA Latin Philology, at the Aristotle University) and English Language & Literature (BA English, American College of Thessaloniki). His main research interests are the reception of antiquity in the anglophone world and the applications of literary theory in poetry. He currently holds a scholarship from the Foundation for Education and European Culture, in Athens, Greece.
“Byron’s Literary Pilgrimage to Rome: The Reception of Horace in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage” The main focus of my paper will be to examine specific passages from Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage that allude to the Odes, the predominant work of the Roman poet Horace, to showcase how Byron’s pilgrimage to Italy is intertwined with his complex relationship with Roman literary culture. In this manner, we will explore how, through the reception of the Odes, the British poet finds himself in direct conversation with Roman culture and how his perception of Rome, both in terms of literature, as well as history, gives us a glimpse of his character and ideology.

OMAR F. MIRANDA (University of San Francisco) – Associate Professor of English. He is co-editor of the recent publication, Percy Shelley for Our Times (Cambridge University Press, 2024), editor of On the 200th Anniversary of Lord Byron’s Manfred (Romantic Circles Praxis Series, 2019), and editor of the abridged teaching edition of Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (Romantic Circles, 2022). He is working on two book projects: one on Romantic lyric and exile and another on the rise of global celebrity culture in the Romantic era.
“Understanding Lord Byron’s Celebrity through Don Juan” Lord Byron was telling us a lot about his own celebrity through his long poem and masterpiece. In this talk, I aim to decode those messages, arguing that Don Juan’s guidebook to Byron’s particular celebrity of performances and contradictions serves as a tribute to two of his celebrity precursors: the Venezuelan revolutionary, Francisco de Miranda (1750-1816), and the French-Swiss Woman of Letters, Germaine de Staël (1766-1817). Ultimately, I show how, as Byron embodied his Mirandist and Staëlian models of celebrity in his own day-to-day, he also embedded the poses and paradoxes of these celebrity precedents into his great poem.

MAŁGORZATA NOWAK (Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań) – PhD researcher, PI of the project “Theodicy Motives in Juliusz Słowacki’s Works – on the Modernity of Polish Romanticism” (funding: National Science Centre, Poland). Her research is focused on the problem of evil and the figure of Satan in the Romantic era, the Romantic breakthrough, comparative literature, the history and criticism of literary translation.
“In the Quest of God and Eternity: Juliusz Slowacki on Byronic Roads” The Polish poet Juliusz Słowacki, influenced by Byron in many ways, between August 1836 and June 1837, made a journey to the East – he saw the Egyptian pyramids and spent one night at Christ’s tomb. During this journey Słowacki attempted to change his metaphysical views – besides the earlier, youthful agnosticism, desire to find a personal God and hope for eternal life appeared in the poet’s writings. This article aims to compare (using mostly close reading and Ricoeur’s symbolism of evil) the attitude to God and eternity that emerges from the “travel” works of both poets (Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Podróż do Ziemi Świętej z Neapolu, Ojciec zadżumionych and selected poems) and excerpts from their correspondence. What image of God emerges from the poets’ works? Which of the attributes traditionally ascribed to Him (eternity, omnipotence, omniscience, personality, unity) are most revealed by Słowacki and Byron? This perspective will help to show the specificity of Polish culture and history, and at the same time Słowacki’s universality and his contribution to the culture of European Romanticism.

PEDRO AUGUSTO PINTO (University of Sao Paolo) – is a PhD candidate in Cultural and Literary Studies and Master in Russian Literature and Culture (2020), with an exchange period at the Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences (2018), graduated and licensed in History by the same university (2017) with exchange periods at the Moscow State University (Russia, 2012) and St. Mary’s University College (London, UK, 2014).
“Byron and Russian Literature: Considerations on His Literary Influence” This communication focuses on the presence of Byron’s works in Russian literature during the early 19th century, particularly in the works of A. S. Pushkin and M. Yu. Lermontov. Although widely acknowledged and easily identifiable, this presence is often viewed as a straightforward fact, with few inquiries into the literary and social nature of such presence, especially concerning its historical reasons. This communication aims to synthesize some of the key aspects of this timeliness and relevance, relating them to the literary and social context of Russia during that period, while simultaneously seeking to identify the elements in the works of the English poet that allowed such a presence to become possible.

DAVID RADCLIFFE (Virginia Tech) – literary historian and digital humanist at Virginia Tech who made extensive use of the Messolonghi memoirs in Lord Byron and his Times website in his current digital project, Social Networks in Georgian Britain, which tracks relationships among 50,000 persons and 500 organizations – the London Greek Committee among them.
“Byron among the Christians” The memoirs recording Byron’s experiences in the Greek revolution are all problematic. If Byron was using James Kennedy as a Boswell to record his opinions he chose a likely vessel, for Kennedy was immune to irony and literal-minded to a fault. However, the Conversations on Religion with Lord Byron, while perhaps the first Messolonghi memoir to be written, was one of the last to be published – only after Kennedy had read the other memoirs and after his unfinished manuscript had passed through the obstetric ministrations of his missionary widow and John Murray’s press. Yet, like Lady Blessington’s later Conversations of Lord Byron, his portrait rings true.

DAVID ROESSEL and MACKENZIE KORNBLUTH (Stockton University) – David is the Peter and Stella Yiannos Professor of Greek Language and Literature. He is the author of In Byron’s Shadow: Modern Greece in the English and American Imagination, as well as editions of Langston Hughes and Tennessee Williams. He is currently working on memoirs and stories written by British and Americans who served in Greece during World War II.
“From the Oak to the Olive: Julia Ward Howe’s Greek Journey” American philhellene Samuel Gridley Howe was inspired by Byron to volunteer for the Greek cause. His An Historical Sketch of the Greek Revolution (1828) was the most extensive American account. He attempted to stifle the authorial career of his wife, Julia Ward Howe. In 1867, they returned to Greece, with her account published as From the Oak to the Olive. This paper will focus on: how she interpreted progress of the Greek state from 1820s to1860s; how her opinions were influenced by the hopes of the philhellenes, such as her husband and Byron; what role do gender relations play; and does visiting Greece with the American “hero” of the War have any of effect on the “civil wars” in the Howe marriage? As the text is not familiar to many, and it is important to hear her own voice, Mackenzie Kornbluth will perform a few sections of the text as part of the presentation.

KAILA ROSE (International Association of Byron Societies) – Byron Society of America Outreach Coordinator and IABS Communications Officer. With over a decade of immersion in the Byron world, Kaila has amplified outreach efforts through diverse multimedia platforms and worked to expand the societies’ reach by fostering inclusivity within membership and partnerships across the academic community. With creative initiatives and unwavering dedication, Kaila hopes to enrich the global dialogue surrounding Byron’s enduring influence on literature and culture.
“‘Between two worlds life hovers like a star”: A Byronic Exploration of our Alien World and the Social Responsibility of Pop Art’s Influence” This paper charts a course through Byronic constellations. With Byron at the helm, I explore two contemporary texts: David Bowie’s final album Blackstar and a fan production of a Star Trek episode––appropriately named––“Pilgrim of Eternity”. In what I view as a shared effort, these “stars” capitalize on their influence to push fanbases toward thinking about cycles of power in popular and familiar spaces. Their subjects of Space and other worlds are not just intriguing, but powerful commentaries on our shared alienness. In our fandom, we join these hovering artists, working to reshape a better view of this world in the midst of our enjoyment.

MARIA GABRIELLA TIGANI SAVA (University of Malta) received her PhD in History from the University of Malta and Padua. Her research interests focus on cultural history, Mediterranean studies (exiles and court studies), and the history of emotions. She is the author of the monograph on the connections between Byron and Italian nationalism, Risorgimento: l’Io romantico in azione: Emozioni, cultura europea e identità nazionale nel byronismo italiano (Rubbettino, 2016).
“Tributes to Byron in Romantic Italy” This paper offers a selection of admirers of the English poet, including Italian patriots, priests, and poets. It examines minor literature, and sources adopted are mainly textual, such as poems, newspapers, magazine articles, literary criticism pages, academic discourses, and translations. It aims to show how the “Pilgrim of Eternity” was perceived as both a poet and a man and his legacy in the first half of nineteenth-century Italian culture.

JANE STABLER (University of St Andrews) – Professor of Romantic Literature and author of Byron, Poetics and History (Cambridge, 2002) and The Artistry of Exile: Romantic and Victorian Writers in Italy (Oxford, 2013) and with Dr Gavin Hopps and Dr Matthew Ward is editor of The Complete Poems of Lord Byron for the Longman Annotated English Poets series. Volumes IV and V, Don Juan, should appear in May 2024.
“‘Time is—Time was—Time’s past’: Moments with the Pilgrim of Eternity” In Canto I of Don Juan, Byron refers to The Famous History of Fryer Bacon (1661). The tale contains a moral about heeding timely warnings, but also conveys the uncanny way in which we experience the passing of time. This talk looks at the ways in which Byron plays with the reader’s experience of time in his poetry, particularly as it relates to the possibility of simultaneity. The talk grows out of thoughts on a passage in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (a novel in which Byron appears more than once): “For Macbeth’s rhetoric about the impossibility of being many opposite things in the same moment, referred to the clumsy necessities of action and not to the subtler possibilities of feeling. We cannot speak a loyal word and be meanly silent, we cannot kill and not kill in the same moment; but a moment is room wide enough for the loyal and mean desire, for the outlash of a murderous thought and the sharp backward stroke of repentance” (I iv). An exploration of Byronic “moments” will follow.

A.E. STALLINGS – an American poet who lives in Athens. She has published four volumes of verse and a selected poems, and three volumes of verse translation. The recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur foundations, she is serving a term as the current Oxford Professor of Poetry.

ANDREW STAUFFER (University of Virginia) – professor and chair of English and the President of the Byron Society of America. He is the author of Byron: A Life in Ten Letters (Cambridge, 2024) and the co-editor, with Jonathan Sachs, of Lord Byron: Selected Writings for the 21st-Century Oxford Authors series (2023). Other recent publications include Book Traces: Nineteenth-Century Readers and the Future of the Library (U of Pennsylvania, 2021), which won the 2021 Marilyn Gaull Book Award from the Wordsworth-Coleridge Association, and a special issue of Studies in Romanticism, “Romantic Women and their Books,” co-edited with Michelle Levy (2021).
“Byron in Messolonghi, 1824-2024” Byron’s hundred-day residence in Messolonghi has been the subject of extensive biographical treatment, from the earliest publications by his companions in 1824 to the present day. In this talk, I will focus primarily on Byron the writer in Messolonghi, rereading the letters and poetry he composed from January to April 1824 in an attempt to characterize the conclusion of his literary career. In addition, I will discuss how the traces Byron left in Messolonghi have continued to come to light over the past two centuries, and how pilgrims to the Sacred City, following in Byron’s wake, have contributed to our sense of the poet and his work.

MICHELLE M. TAYLOR (University of South Florida) – Associate Professor of Instruction at the University of South Florida. Her research focuses on British literature of the long nineteenth century, animal studies, religious studies, book history, and digital humanities. Her first book project, Mongrel Genres, examines the relationship between the concept of canine subjectivity and the development of several literary subgenres from the Romantic period to the present. Her second book will trace the influence of John Wesley and Methodism on Romantic poetry and the Victorian novel. She is also the Director of the Wesley Works Digitization Project.
“The New Byronic Hero: Teaching Byron at the Bicentennial” explores the possibilities that emerge when we face Byron’s demons head on in the classroom. As we witness global war, major climate events, and general political upheaval, our moment is more like the Romantics’ than anyone could have predicted. While I never sugar-coat the truth about the less savory aspects of Byron’s biography, I also feel a pedagogical obligation to demonstrate how literature can help us cope productively with despair. Byron eventually harnessed his for higher purposes, including his support for Greek Independence, rather than falling prey to it. This is the model of heroism our students need now.

FANI-MARIA TSIGAKOU – Art-Historian. After a BA in Archaeology she did a PhD thesis in the History of Art at University College London. During 1980-2015 she worked at the Benaki Museum, Athens, as Curator of the Department of Paintings, Prints and Drawings. Her specific research interest is the perception and image of Greece and the Greeks in European paintings, prints and in travel literature on Greece, from the 15th to the 19th centuries. Her book The Rediscovery of Greece. Travellers and Painters of the Romantic Era (Thames and Hudson, 1981, with an introduction by Sir Steven Runciman), is considered the basic reference work on the subject. A world specialist on the subject of “Images of Greece by foreign artist-travellers” and “Philhellenic iconography” she has published extensively on these topics and organized more than 170 exhibitions in Europe, the USA, Australia and Japan.
“Ut Pictura Poesis: Byron’s Poetry vs. Byronic Iconography” UT PICTURA POESIS, meaning that AS PAINTING SO IS POETRY, an idea first stated in antiquity, that stimulated academic debate for many centuries, in the age of the Renaissance finally vindicated the art of painting. The issue I negotiate in my presentation is how can poetry be transformed into painting, in reference to Philhellenic art works inspired by Byron’s poetry. The equation is a great challenge to the artist, because it demands sensitive images that reveal not only the deeper content of the verses, but also the poet’s intentions and feeling. Byron’s strongly visual descriptions of the landscape of Greece and his powerfully characterized dramatic heroes and heroines created a spectacular source of inspiration for Romantic painters. Throughout the nineteenth century a considerable number of European Romantic art works attempted to bring to life the lines of Byron’s poems. However, few of them may be considered successful, because to give a visual form to a poem is an achievement that goes beyond an artist’s creative ability of illustration.

JEFFERY VAIL (Boston University) – Master Lecturer in the Humanities at Boston University, where he has taught since 2000. He is the author of The Literary Relationship of Lord Byron and Thomas Moore (2001) and editor of The Unpublished Letters of Thomas Moore (2013). He annotated the Modern Library Classics edition of The Selected Poetry of Lord Byron (2002) and has published numerous articles and book chapters on Byron, Moore, and other British Romantics.
“‘Bright, ruin’d spirit’: Thomas Moore and the Byron Legend” will examine the ways in which Moore’s writings shaped the popular image of Byron as the “Pilgrim of Eternity”. Moore’s biography of Byron as well as his poems about Byron countered Robert Southey’s accusation of Satanism by depicting Byron as a sympathetic fallen angel, shut out of paradise not because of his own evil but by social and psychological forces beyond his control. Moore wrote that Byron was by nature a “homeless animal”, and depicts his shrineless pilgrimage through life as at once tragic and sublime.

FERNANDO VALVERDE (University of Virginia) – Professor at the University of Virginia and has been voted the most relevant Spanish-language poet born since 1970 by nearly two hundred critics and researchers from more than one hundred international universities. His books have been published internationally and translated into several languages. He has received some of the most significant awards for poetry in Spanish, among them the Federico García Lorca, the Emilio Alarcos del Principado de Asturias and the Antonio Machado. His last book, The Insistence of Harm, has been the most-sold book of poetry in Spain for months and has received the Book of the Year award from the Latino American Writers Institute of the City University of New York. For his collaboration in a work of fusion between poetry and flamenco he was nominated for a Latin Grammy in 2014. Los hombres que mataron a mi madre (Visor) is his most recent book of poetry. In 2022, Fernando Valverde published the first biography of the poet Percy B. Shelley in Spanish and in 2024 he published a monumental biography of Lord Byron (UNAM). He is considered one of the greatest specialists in Romanticism today.
“Allegra in Bagnacavallo: New Documents and Unpublished Discoveries” In September 2020, I was authorized to enter the abandoned Convent of San Giovanni Battista in Bagnacavallo, the place where Allegra, daughter of Lord Byron and Claire Clairmont, was admitted on January 22, 1821, and would never leave its walls. On April 20, 1822, she died due to fever and there are many questions about the moments immediately before and after the little girl’s death. As it is not the mission of this conference to tell again a story already known to everyone, I am going to limit myself to presenting the documents from the Bagnacavallo archive, which the nuns carefully preserved and which are in perfect condition. Access to this archive has been sought by researchers for two centuries. Now I can present it in its entirety along with the first photographs of the interior of the convent, which include possibly Allegra’s cell.

TIM WANDLING (Sonoma State University) – currently the Department Chair of English, he has long been a scholar and teacher of the reception of Romanticism, in particular Lord Byron and his many readers. He has presented or published papers on Lord Byron, Thomas Hardy, J.S. Mill, and the teaching of Social Protest literature. In 2019, he presented the paper “‘Fierce Loves’ and Romantic Ironies: Joni Mitchell and Lord Byron” at the International Conference on Romanticism in Manchester, England. His current book project, Living Romanticism, addresses connections between 19th C. Romantic Poets and 1970s Singer Songwriters.
“The Ends of Eternity: Byron, Auden and ‘gay and witty muses’.” This talk examines a queer, transgressive poetics connects Byron and Auden, formally represented as the capacious “form that’s large enough to swim in” (Auden, 84) of Byron’s mock epic Don Juan. In Don Juan, Byron quips that mortals never know what “ends we are at” (I CXXXIII). The play on philosophic meditation and confused erotic fumbling in the dark permeates his mock epic. The personae of both poets bathe in that capacious form, allowing irony and play to predominate over narrative and vision. Both writers use public play to explore private space practicing an irreverent “queer optimism” (Snediker) that is both immediate (McGann) and a link to more eternal ends.

MATTHEW WARD teaches at the University of Birmingham, UK. His research revolves around Romantic and post-Romantic poetry, emotions and affect, and the environmental humanities. His publications include Romantic Poets and the Laughter of Feeling (Oxford University Press, 2024), and a co-edited book, Byron Among the English Poets (Cambridge University Press, 2021). He is now co-editor, with Jane Stabler, of volume 6 of The Poems of Lord Byron, part of the Longman Annotated English Poets series.
““Byron and the ‘sea-born city’ of Allusion” Taking the ‘sea-born city’ of Venice as my starting point, in my paper I want to think about the way water acts as a figure of allusion for Byron, or a spur for it. How might the flow of water, or its reflective and refractive qualities, or the singing of competing gondoliers as they glide across its surface, suggest themselves as forms of poetic imitation and echo? Both are closely tied to water through the myth of Narcissus, where sound acts as a kind of reflection of water, or of what’s reflected in it. So, I will think, also, about how Byron echoes himself, and stages his own self-absorption through liquid allusions—things expressed not only via heroic complaint but, as often, through the mixed modes of romance and tragi-comedy.

MAŁGORZATA WICHOWSKA (Adam Mickiewicz Museum, Warsaw) is a Polish philologist by education and passion. Curator in the Manuscript Department of the Adam Mickiewicz Museum of Literature, Warsaw and specialist in preparing literary archives. She is also responsible for museum exhibitions and publications, including editorial ones.
“Byron in the Adam Mickiewicz Museum of Literature” [paper to be delivered by Piotr Prasula] The connections to English literature represented by the Museum’s collections include the manuscript of the first Polish translation of Mazeppa (in prose, 1824). Mickiewicz, as one of the most important Romantic writers and the emigrant pilgrim of this period, is naturally of great interest to the project “Byron: The Pilgrim of Eternity.” Beyond mere influence the poets shared what might be termed a poetic sympathy of spirit, characteristic for the Romantic period, and manifested in mutual thematic and stylistic interests, and even in parallel life trajectories. “I read only Byron […], because I dislike lies”, Mickiewicz wrote in a letter to a friend in late 1822. From the very outset the nature of the bond between Mickiewicz and the English poet was not about emulation, about drawing on specific motifs or techniques – though there’s no dearth of such influences. There is a symbolic image of the two poets’ encounter, of the exceptional bond and dialogue between Mickiewicz and Byron – not the legendary(?), but the living Byron – which does not simply influence but in a way provokes. There is a notebook, where the poet wrote down some fragments of his translation of The Giaour and also scenes from Dziady (Forefathers’ Eve), Mickiewicz’s national mystery play. This manuscript (collections of the Mickiewicz Museum in Paris) remains at the center of my reflections on the dialogue between Mickiewicz and Byron.

DAVID WOODHOUSE (The Byron Society, UK) – Trustee of the Byron Society. His 1996 doctoral thesis, supervised by Eric Griffiths, was titled Shades of Pope: Byron’s Development as a Satirist. His Byronic collaborations include proofreading Anne Barton’s Don Juan (CUP, 1992) and editing Bernard Beatty’s Reading Byron (LUP, 2023). With John Leigh, he co-wrote the best-selling Football Lexicon (Faber, 2004) and his latest monograph, Who Only Cricket Know: Hutton’s Men in the West Indies 1953/54 (Fairfield, 2021), was 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).
“The realms of rhyme’: Byron in 8 Couplets” Taking a celebratory hint from the BBC radio programme Desert Island Discs, I’m going to provide brief appreciations of eight Byron couplets, starting with one taken from English Bards and Scotch Reviewers and ending with one from the eleventh Canto of Don Juan. This does not purport to be a definitive selection of the best couplets Byron wrote, but seeks to provide some sense both of his evolving expertise in the measure, which he learnt at the knee of Dryden and Pope, and his self-awareness as a maker of verse and man of letters.