9.45am-11.00am

PANEL 1 (Salvin Room) CHAIR: EMILY PATERSON MORGAN 

Kaila Rose (Independent): ‘“In this instance I was not so fortunate as to be prophetic”: Andamento, or the “Prophecy of Byron”’

Emma Peacocke (Independent): ‘Abolitionism and the “Gladiator” in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage’

Svetlana Koroleva (Nizhny Novgorod University): ‘Byron’s Venetian Text As a “Constant” And Its Reception in Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman’

11.00am-11.30am BREAK (Tea/Coffee)

11.30am-1.00pm

PANEL 2 (Salvin Room) CHAIR: JONATHAN GROSS 

Christine Kenyon Jones (King’s College, London): ‘Byron, Keats and the “Chameleon” poet’

Mirka Horová (Charles University, Prague): ‘Byron and the Resilience of Contrariety’

James Quinnell (Independent): ‘“Questions answerless, and yet incessant”: Byron’s Open-Mindedness’

1.00pm-2.00pm LUNCH (Main Hall)

2.00pm-3.30pm

PANEL 3 (Salvin Room): CHAIR: DAVID WOODHOUSE

Sara Cole (Lancaster University): ‘Byron’s "Varied Wonders": Science and Satire from English Bards to Don Juan’

James Vigus (Queen Mary University of London): ‘“[T]hou somewhat aged youth!” Byron’s portrayal of Tsar Alexander I in The Age of Bronze (1823)’ 

Gary Kelly (University of Alberta): ‘Nobs, Mobs, and Reformist Modernities: Byron and Egan’ 

3.30pm-5.00pm

PANEL 4 (Salvin Room): CHAIR: CHRISTINE KENYON JONES

Sabarno Sinha (University of Texas): ‘When Byron was Anti-French, or; Teaching Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage in Victorian Calcutta’

Amy Weldon (Luther College, Decorah): ‘Going Mobile: Studying Abroad with Lord Byron’

Frederick F. J. Featham (Independent): ‘“Byron vs. Bullying”: Teaching Lord Byron through Art, Language, and Humanist Values in Contemporary Education’

5.00pm-5.30pm BREAK (Tea/Coffee)

9.30am-11.00am

PANEL 5 (Salvin Room): CHAIR: ALAN RAWES

Dan Wall (University of Aberdeen): ‘Byronic Contrariety and the problem of Literary Biography’

Federica Vignoli (Independent): ‘The Tension between Contrasting Forces and the Search for Stability in Byron: Teresa Gamba’s Narrative and the Process of Emotional and Identity Integration’

Qingbao Song (China University of Political Science and Law): ‘The Dissemination and Transformation of Byron’s Greek Complex and Heroic Image during the Late Qing Dynasty and Early Republic of China’

11.00am-11.30am BREAK (Tea/Coffee)

11.30am-1.00pm

PANEL 6 (Salvin Room): CHAIR: GAVIN HOPPS

Rita Farah (Independent): ‘Reimagining Manfred: From Gothic Sublimity to Neuromancer’s Techno-Sublime’

Michelle Taylor (University of South Florida): ‘Taylor Swift, Byronic Heroine: Reimagining Byron’s Mobility’

Jake Hughes (Independent): ‘Dylan & Byron: Creatures Void of Form’ 

1.00pm-2.00pm LUNCH (Main Hall)

2.00pm-3.00pm (Salvin Room): CHAIR: JONATHON SHEARS

Jenn Larsen (Independent): ‘“My dearest C.--”: Exploring the forgotten life of Byron’s beloved friend Lord Clare’

The talk will be followed by a viewing of Byroniana in the Raven Mason Suite

3.30pm-5.00pm

PANEL 7 (Salvin Room): CHAIR: MIRKA HOROVÁ

Guðni Elísson (University of Iceland): ‘“I shall die at top” first: Byron and the Overcoming of Death’ 

Leon Wang (Brandeis University): ‘“I am more fit to die than people think”: Byron as an Existential Philosopher’

Young-ok An (University of St. Thomas): ‘The Ecology as/of Inheritance in Werner’

5.00pm-5.15pm BREAK (Tea/Coffee)

9.00am-11.00am

PANEL 8 (Salvin Room): CHAIR: MARK SANDY

Samantha Crain (Independent): ‘Examining Em-dashed Sincerity in Juan and Haidée’s Interlude’

Amal Bou Sleiman (Saint Joseph University, Beirut): ‘From Confinement to Consciousness: A Sartrean Reading of Byron’s The Prisoner of Chillon’

Olivier Feignier (French Byron Society): ‘Byron as a Multi-faceted Influencer of French Romantic Poetry’

Matthew Ward (University of Birmingham): ‘Byron’s Living Hand and the Posthumous Life of Poets’

11.00am-11.30am BREAK (Tea/Coffee)

11.30am-1.00pm

PANEL 9 (Salvin Room): CHAIR: PIYA PAL-LAPINSKI

Madeleine Callaghan (University of Sheffield): ‘Byron: Lyric Concealment and Confession’

Maria Kalinowska (Warsaw University): ‘Two Faces of Polish Byronism: Melancholy and Nothingness Versus Dynamism and Transgression’

Mark Sandy (University of Durham): ‘“Living on in Shattered Guise”: Byron’s Digressive Art and Poetic Selfhood’

1.00pm-2.00pm LUNCH

2.15pm-4.15pm IABS AGM (Old Library)

The excursion to the World of Wedgwood Museum in Barlaston includes a talk about the history of English potter and abolitionist, Josiah Wedgwood I. Following this, we will visit the beautiful gardens of Trentham designed by Capability Brown where there will be a chance for shopping.    

9.30am DEPART / RETURN 3.00pm

Coach Collection from Marriott Hotel (Keele Campus)

Dinner by own arrangement

The excursion to Tatton Park includes a tour of the Mansion House and the Gardens and a talk about the library during the Romantic period and the rare book collection. This includes first editions of works by Byron and Jane Austen.

DEPART 8.30am / RETURN 3.00pm 

Coach Collection from Marriott Hotel (Keele Campus)

Young-ok An, ‘The Ecology as/of Inheritance in Werner’

Seen from an ecological perspective, Byron’s Werner (1822) explores the destruction of humans and ‘natures’ caused by war and violence. The subtitle of Werner,‘the Inheritance’, can be understood as not just familial inheritance, but also the whole ecosystem as a common inheritance for humans and non-human beings alike. Exploring the poem’s key ecological motifs, especially the ‘shattered’ forests of the post-Thirty-Years War (1618–48) landscape, this paper interrogates the meaning of inheritance in Werner’s struggle with his own role in the chain of human violence, environmental devastation, and moral crisis.

Amal Bou Sleiman, ‘From Confinement to Consciousness: A Sartrean Reading of Byron’s The Prisoner of Chillon’

Byron’s The Prisoner of Chillon showcases a form of consciousness reflected by Sartre in Being and Nothingness. The poet brings into play a dramatic confrontation between Being-in-itself, represented by the prison, and Being-for-itself, reflected in Bonivard’s consciousness. Byron’s secluded and introspective protagonist Bonivard confronts freedom, identity, suffering, and the meaning of existence in ways that resonate with Sartrean ideas of nothingness, self-creation, and radical choice. Through imprisonment, loss, and isolation, Bonivard develops a form of consciousness that emerges from absence, suffering, and negation. Consequently, Byron’s work embodies significant Sartrean existential ideas about identity and existence.

Madeleine Callaghan, ‘Byron: Lyric Concealment and Confession’

For many, Byron is the ultimate example of the poet that forces the self into the limelight. But which self is Byron, particularly in his lyrics? Byron’s manifold selves do not have to fix Byron as only a theatrical poet, and that is especially true of his lyric output. This paper reads Byron as drawn to the manifold possibilities of the lyric ‘I’, running the gauntlet between voicing confession and concealment, to mining self-extinction and self-centredness out of the genre.

Sara Cole, ‘Byron’s “Varied Wonders”: Science and Satire from English Bards to Don Juan’

Byron’s interest in new medical and scientific developments informs his radical world view and provides him with vital material for his satire on the modern world. Through satire, he observes and dissects the impact of the age’s extraordinary scientific discoveries and technological developments. The ‘varied wonders’ of English Bards, mocked as flamboyant participants in a carnival, reappear in Don Juan as emblems of Byron’s more nuanced engagement with science and the modern world.

Sam Crain, ‘Examining Em-dashed Sincerity in Juan and Haidée’s Interlude’

Sporadic punctuator or not, Byron’s fondness for the em-dash permeates his letters and his poetic works. My paper examines the potential relationship between dashes and sincerity in stanzas 193-208 of Don Juan, Canto II, while respecting the tension Jane Stabler identifies between collaboration and coercion. To this end, I find it fitting to look at both the text from McGann’s Complete Poetical Works and the new annotated Don Juan edited by Stabler and Gavin Hopps.

Guðni Elísson, ‘“I shall die at top” first: Byron and the Overcoming of Death’

Lord Byron crafted a self-authored ‘art of dying’, focusing on the works of Swift and Voltaire. The argument suggests that Byron’s fear of death is less about extinction and more about the mode: madness, insomnia, and loss of self-mastery, as exemplified by Swift’s decline and the ‘Voltairean’ deathbed narrative of panic or hypocrisy. I propose that Byron’s deathbed utterances are intended for an audience that will record them, allowing Byron to maintain an ‘ideal’ coherence in death despite its passivity.

Rita Farah, ‘Reimagining Manfred: From Gothic Sublimity to Neuromancer’s Techno-Sublime’

Lord Byron’s Manfred (1817) and William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) demonstrate a triple constancy in genre evolution through the Byronic hero, the sublime, and the Gothic. By framing cyberspace as an interconnected, haunted architecture of control, this comparative study argues that modern technological spaces generate a techno-sublime that counters, yet structurally replicates the existential vertigo characteristic of Romantic natural landscapes. Ultimately, this continuity highlights the structural dynamic driving the isolated, psychologically fragmented protagonist’s confrontation with an overwhelming void.

Frederick F.J. Featham, ‘“Byron vs. Bullying”: Teaching Lord Byron through Art, Language, and Humanist Values in Contemporary Education’

To commemorate the bicentenary of Lord Byron’s death in 2024, the Book Club of the QLS (Quality Language Schools) Network organised a nationwide educational and art project involving forty language schools across Greece. Drawing on selected quotations from Byron’s poetry, students explored themes of empathy, kindness, and resilience through creative anti-bullying artwork. The presentation examines the project’s conception, implementation, and outcomes, highlighting innovative ways of connecting Byron’s literary legacy with language learning and contemporary values education.

Olivier Feignier, ‘Byron as a Multi-faceted Influencer of French Romantic Poetry’

Byron’s influence upon French poetry in the romantic era is not limited to the Byronic hero’s progeny, in prose even more than in verse. It extends to the description of seascapes and mountains, to the way of writing by juxtaposing independent sections without transitions, to artistic digressions, conversational tone, the mixture of comedy and seriousness. All these traits sketch a portrait of Byron as an example for French romantic poets, whose influence evolved from his lifetime to long after his death.

Gavin Hopps, ‘Redeeming Lightness: Byron’s Don Juan’

This paper will offer a reconsideration of Don Juan’s ‘airy manner’. Challenging a widespread tendency to read Byron’s levity exclusively as a matter of frivolity, fickleness, licentiousness or irreverence, the paper will canvass a range of neglected and impoverished conceptions of lightness and will attempt to show how these can help us to appreciate Byron’s comic masterpiece. In addition to considering carnivalesque, courtly and eschatological models of levity, the paper will focus in particular on the poem’s fashioning of a species of ‘camp Romanticism’.

Mirka Horová, ‘Byron and the Resilience of Contrariety’

Among the British Romantics, Byron stands out as characteristically contrary to the status quo. Sometimes he is reckoned to be ‘contrary’ for the sake of it – ‘But I was born for opposition’. However broad and rich the debate on Byron’s contrary nature, often misunderstood as simplycapricious, might have been, it is time, in our exceptionally unstable times, to revisit and reassess this Byronic cliché. Contrariety invites focus on the specificities of performing opposition – and it is within this contested space that Byron shines, and where insight as to the complex resilience of contrariety may be gleaned.

Jacob Hughes, ‘Dylan & Byron: Creatures Void of Form’

This paper will consider the legacy of Lord Byron in the elusive figure of American songwriter Bob Dylan. Moving beyond the trappings of celebrity persona, I see such poses and postures as part of a broader artistic project—and an ever-evolving lyrical style—that continually reinvents itself in order to reflect and dodge the world it encounters. Anticipating Dylan’s ‘creature void of form’, Byron’s true rock legacy may lie as much in his disappearance into form as in the figure he cuts.

Maria Kalinowska, ‘Two Faces of Polish Byronism: Melancholy and Nothingness Versus Dynamism and Transgression’

The paper compares Polish Romanticism’s two most important variants of the reception of Byron: Byron’s oeuvre (1) as inspiration for creating a melancholy, petrified, dead world, its image being the Ukrainian steppe (Antoni Malczewski’s Maria, 1825), and (2) as inspiration for creating a Romantic individual – a dynamic, active, politically engaged and rebellious hero (Adam Mickiewicz’s Forefathers’ Eve). In Mickiewicz’s Forefathers’ Eve, the most important work of Polish literature, Byronism may be understood as transgression.

Gary Kelly, ‘Nobs, Mobs, and Reformist Modernities: Byron and Egan’

Reading Byron’s Don Juan and Egan’s Life in London in certain ways illuminates not only the post-Napoleonic condition of Britain and its empire but also the political uses of reading then and now. The paper explores those ways and returns to bibliology: it’s less about Byron or Egan than about how these books could be used by their likely readers, mostly neither nobs nor mobs, who could afford the books, using them to power the hegemony they/we still enjoy.

Christine Kenyon Jones, ‘Byron, Shelley, Keats and the “Chameleon” poet’

This paper considers how the concept of ‘chameleonism’ and poets is used by Byron, Shelley and Keats. It revisits Lady Blessington’s association of Byron with the term and contrasts the poets’ use of it, which is mainly complimentary for Keats and the reverse for Shelley and Byron, who applies it to the falsely positive omen of the rainbow in Don Juan Canto 2 and to pejoratively identify the lead character in Werner.

Svetlana Koroleva, ‘Constant Features of Byron’s Venetian Text and Their Reception in Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman’

Byron’s encounter with Venice in 1816 not only engendered new ways of grasping its meanings, but actualized its mythological image. Russian literary image of Venice in its core elements was formed in the 1820s by two poets – Ivan Kozlov and Alexander Pushkin – and for both Byron’s ‘Venetian text’ in its constant features was the key source. However, in Pushkin’s late poem The Bronze Horseman these constant features, together with ‘Venetian’ motives and narrative techniques borrowed from Beppo and Marino Faliero, are implicitly involved in the author’s multispectral dialogue with the reader concerning the ‘spirit’ of Petersburg, the present and future of post-Petrine Russia, and the ‘belittlement’ of man in the face of imperial power.

Jenn Larsen, ‘“My dearest C.--”: Exploring the forgotten life of Byron’s beloved friend Lord Clare’

The character of John FitzGibbon, 2nd Earl of Clare, has long been subsumed by the Byronic myth. Yet an intimate correspondence with Ralph Sneyd of Keele Hall illuminates his life narrative. Jenn Larsen investigated hundreds of unpublished letters to create a portrait of Clare’s distinct persona, revealing how Clare’s protection of his father’s memory impacted his dealings with Thomas Moore, and discovering how Clare’s loyalty to Byron led to a resolution which still impacts his reputation, and Byron studies today.
—Accompanied by a curated letter display with selections from the Sneyd Papers, Special Collections and Archives, Keele University Library.

Piya Pal-Lapinski, ‘"The Vampire Isles of Greece": Byron, Revenants and Archaeology in the Ottoman Mediterranean’

My talk will explore the parallel rise of archaeology and vampirism in the Eastern Mediterranean and Greek islands under Ottoman rule, and how this may have influenced Byron's framing of his revenants in major works such as Sardanapalus, Manfred, Lara and The Siege of Corinth, along with his thoughts on history, culture, and the idea of ‘return’. Was Byron aware of Greece as a part of a Mediterranean continuum of fluid borders and cosmopolitan exchanges rather than as a specific Hellenic ideal? Does Byron summon his revenants in Ottoman lands and beyond to raise questions about how we lay claim to cultural, ethnic or national frontiers?

Emma Peacocke, 'Abolitionism and the "Gladiator" in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage'

This paper argues that Byron’s evocation of the captive gladiator in Canto IV of Childe Harold fits seamlessly into a tradition of overtly Abolitionist poetry depicting enslaved men, yearning for their families and preferring death to captivity. This reaches back to John Bicknell and Thomas Day’s The Dying Negro (1773). Byron’s excoriation of the Roman empire in Childe Harold by implication condemns the British empire. Byron draws on the national, political, and cultural affiliations most familiar to his contemporaries to equate Britain’s exploitation of enslaved labour with the notorious corruption of Roman ethics that produced gladiatorial spectacles.

James Quinnell, ‘“Questions answerless, and yet incessant”: Byron’s Open-Mindedness’

When Byron asks, in Don Juan, ‘Grim reader, did you ever see a ghost’, the question is more than tongue in cheek; as the poem’s narrator claims, anticipating our raised eyebrows: ‘my belief is serious’. In this paper, I argue that the way that Byron’s mobilité keeps his readers on their toes, bracing for the coming deflation or bursting of any metaphysical bubble, masks the ways in which his poetry quests as intensely as Shelley's.

Alan Rawes, ‘“Wings wherewith to overfly / The narrow circus of my dungeon wall”: Byron, Tasso and the Power of the Imagination’

‘The Lament of Tasso’ (1817) is a full-blown, Romantic celebration of the imagination as a challenge to tyranny, history, class, even reality itself. As such, it transformed Tasso from an eighteenth-century warning against Romanticism into a seminal model for nineteenth-century Romanticism, radically intervening in contemporary debates about the role and value of poetry and poets. Even in a ‘minor’ poem such as ‘The Lament’, rapidly written, on-the-spot, we do not encounter a fleeting engagement with ‘every thing by turns’ so much as the ongoing evolution of Byron’s life-long – and epoch-shaping – fascination with the power of the imagination.

Kaila Rose, ‘“in this instance I was not so fortunate as to be prophetic”: Andamento, or the "Prophecy of Byron”’

Even if Byron himself questioned his prophetic power, this paper argues otherwise by examining his negotiation of change and constancy during his Italian years. Focusing on Ravenna and The Prophecy of Dante, I show that Byron’s political, personal, and poetic transformations reflect alignment rather than instability. Using Ravenna’s mosaics and the concept of andamento—the arrangement and flow of tesserae—as a guiding metaphor, I suggest that Byron assembled seemingly provisional or ‘fugitive pieces’ into enduring coherence, offering a prophetic model of balance in which change is accommodated within his sustaining structure, however foreign its individual parts once were.

Mark Sandy, ‘“Living on in Shattered Guise”: Byron’s Digressive Art and Poetic Selfhood’

Byron’s imaginative negotiations with a mercurial poetic self, which is as present as it is absent, as unified as it is multiple, and as defiant as it is broken, emerges through Byron’s frequent use of digression. This ‘shattered guise’ of Byronic selfhood (as both interruption and the interrupted) provides the imaginative grounds for the ‘living on’ of Byronic poetic identity as, in Nietzsche’s words, an ‘interrupted has-been’.

Sabarno Sinha, ‘When Byron was Anti-French; or, Teaching Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage in Victorian Calcutta’

Was Byron fit to be taught to college students in a nineteenth-century colonial classroom? What determined which poems of his were to be selected, excerpted, and prescribed for examination? This paper argues that the Victorian-era University of Calcutta did not unthinkingly import Byron into its curriculum but constructed several pedagogically and politically useful Byrons. Focusing on syllabi, question papers, and textbook marginalia, I show how one such Byron was made to praise the British, condemn Napoleon, and critique the French.

Qingbao Song, ‘The Dissemination and Transformation of Byron’s Greek Complex and Heroic Image during the Late Qing Dynasty and Early Republic of China’

This paper examines Byron’s early reception in China through the lens of his Greek complex. Beginning with the 1902 translation of The Isles of Greece, Byron inspired Chinese nationalism and anti-imperial resistance. Through Liang Qichao, Su Manshu, and Lu Xun, his heroic image evolved into a multidimensional literary figure.

Michelle Taylor, ‘Taylor Swift, Byronic Heroine: Reimagining Byron’s Mobility’

Whether she portrays herself as a Byronic heroine, Byronic woman, or both, Taylor Swift is acutely aware of how she presents her selves to the world. Her marketing of mutability, including its sorrows, offers a perspective on performativity that operates outside debates about ‘authenticity’. By asserting that the mobile performer is the self and that it can learn to co-exist with other selves, Swift pays homage to Byron and credits him with setting the stage for the Showgirl-as-self model.

Federica Vignoli, ‘The Tension between Contrasting Forces and the Search for Stability in Byron: Teresa Gamba’s Narrative and the Process of Emotional and Identity Integration’

This paper discusses Teresa Gamba’s manuscript ‘Vie de Lord Byron en Italie’, recently transcribed and translated into Italian. It provides both a biographical source and a coherent narrative, offering a unique perspective on Byron’s personality. The figure that emerges differs significantly from theestablished image of Byron, who underwent a gradual and profound process of transformation, particularly evident during his years in Italy. The contribution examines this evolution and its implications for our understanding of the poet’s identity and human development.

James Vigus, ‘“[T]hou somewhat aged youth!” Byron’s portrayal of Tsar Alexander I in The Age of Bronze (1823)’

This paper discusses Byron’s lampooning of the changeable disposition of Tsar Alexander I in The Age of Bronze. It argues that Byron’s caricature of the Russian leader, ‘just as fit for flirting as the helm’, renders him representative of the flimsy spirit of the age. It considers the controversial nature of the satire, partly censored in Italian translation. Further, Byron’s portrayal of Alexander is held up to the light both of recent historical appraisals and other contemporary satire, including that of Thomas Moore.

Dan Wall, ‘Byronic Contrariety and the problem of Literary Biography’

This paper will explore some of the ways in which several of Byron’s early biographers, including Medwin, Galt and Moore, navigated the contradictory aspects of Byron’s character, and will also attempt to consider the reasoning and significance behind these different biographical approaches. This will involve consideration of key extracts from the relevant biographies, and an attempt to explore them in the context of their differing aspirations in terms of how their authors hoped to represent Byron as a coherent figure.

Leon Wang, ‘“I am more fit to die than people think”: Byron as an Existential Philosopher’

This essay will try to read Beppo and Don Juan as part of a continuous experiment with different kinds of existential philosophy over Byron’s writing career. By close reading the poems’ apparent embrace of pragmatism and hedonism, the essay will then hope to suggest a possibility of reading these two supposedly comedic poems as an unsatisfactory attempt by Byron to find peace with life through a semi-Camusian absurdist mindset.

Matthew Ward, ‘Rough hands, living hands, and many hands: Byron on Keats, and the Posthumous Existence of Poets’

I aim to think about the conference themes of change and constancy, transience and permanence, through Byron’s ambivalent feelings towards Keats, particularly his reaction to the latter’s death, and the posthumous life of poetry. I am especially interested in Byron’s instinct for how a writer’s legacy is defined by the interplay between critics, poets, and editors. Reading Byron’s manuscripts alongside printed editions reveals his subtle and ambiguous reactions to fame and the literary marketplace, and sheds light on the ways in which textual editing is an act of recuperation marked out by inevitable loss.

Amy E. Weldon, ‘Going Mobile: Studying Abroad with Lord Byron’

Although inspired by Mary Shelley, my monthlong study-abroad course ‘In Frankenstein’s Footsteps: The Keats-Shelley Circle in London, Geneva, and Italy’ also brings students face-to-face with Lord Byron in many key locations of his life: Harrow School, the Houses of Parliament, the Villa Diodati, and Venice. Moving through places in which we can still ‘repeople with the past’ the traces of Byron’s own works and times, we learn how the challenges and changes of travel prepare us for a world that’s always changing too.

Academic Committee: Madeleine Callaghan, Peter Francev, Mirka Horová, Jonathan Sachs,

Diego Saglia, Maria Schoina, Jonathon Shears

Conference Committee: Jonathon Shears, Sharon Faulke, Lily Martin, Emily Paterson-Morgan