Omar F. Miranda is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of San Francisco. His work examines literatures of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, especially their transnational, global and diasporic contexts. He is the editor of On the 200th Anniversary of Lord Byron’s Manfred: Commemorative Essays (Romantic Circles, 2019) and an open-access abridged teaching edition of Mary Shelley’s 1826 novel, The Last Man (Romantic Circles, 2023). He serves as Vice-President for Academic Outreach on the board of the Keats-Shelley Association of America (K-SAA).
Kate Singer is Mary Lyon Professor of Humanities at Mount Holyoke College. Her work explores gender, sexuality and race in the Romantic period, with a particular focus on affect, media and nonhuman ecologies. She is the author of Romantic Vacancy: The Poetics of Gender, Affect, and Radical Speculation (SUNY, 2019) and co-editor (with Ashley Cross and Suzanne L. Barnett) of Material Transgressions: Beyond Romantic Bodies, Genders, Things (Liverpool University Press, 2020). She serves as the President of the Keats-Shelley Association of America.
Their edited collection Percy Shelley for Our Times, which we discuss below, was published earlier this year by Cambridge University Press.
1) How did you decide you wanted to put together a new essay collection on Percy Shelley?
Back in 2019, Omar was in conversation with Bethany Thomas at Cambridge University Press about the fact that there hadn’t been a recent Percy Shelley volume, and he approached Kate about putting together a collection, since at a recent K-SAA Awards dinner at the MLA conference, we had bonded over a discussion on Shelley and Prometheus Unbound, particularly the orbs passage from Act IV.
One of the things that was really important to us then, and now: we were not simply editing a collection of essays on Shelley for 2024 (or any particular date) because such didn’t seem to align with how we were reading Shelley. Our interest and readings of his poetry and prose took us to what it means to revisit Shelley and to reread him in future moments and places. “Shelley for Our Times” is, therefore, not a reference to our contemporary moment today but is intended to open up Shelley to the biggest and most overlapping “our” possible — according to Shelley’s very own principles. Our point was really that this collection is not codifying a Shelley that is Kate’s and Omar’s, one that we own in our place and time as “a book sealed,” but rather these pages were meant as a shared and contagious space to unfold Shelley to everyone’s readings: ours, yours, theirs, other “ours.”
Our argument is that Shelley’s poetics offers a methodology that elicits multi-temporal, iterative conversations occurring through multiple times and spaces, among myriad audiences. When we get questions about how reading Shelley in 2024 is different from reading Shelley in 2016 (when we met) or in 2018/9 (when we were first imagining the collection), or when we get asked about who the book did and didn’t cite and why (what scholarship we are bringing forward and what we are not), our response typically goes back to our core readings of Shelley and our argument. Shelley asks us to read his work at multiple times and places at once, not at discrete empirical instances. We could not literally include everyone or every germane citation, but that doesn’t mean lack of importance or relevance.
2) How did you go about gathering your contributors?
We went to the people who were interested in extending Shelley through a close attention to Shelley’s words and ideas themselves. We were especially motivated to reach a broad global network of scholars, and we wanted ideally to cross what we sometimes see as the US-British divide. What we really hoped to do was talk with our colleagues around the world about Shelley and the future of Shelley studies. There are, of course, people we asked who did not have time, and there were many more people on our list, and we sadly did not have enough space to allow for all of our desired authors, which means — once again, that this volume should be seen as the beginning of something much bigger, something truly Shelleyan. (This is true for our introduction and the further reading as well. We were really hindered by space and went through, we cannot tell you, how many dozens of revisions.)
3) In your introduction, you discuss Shelley as ‘an arch poet of relation’. What drew you to Shelley’s poetics of involvement and relationality as the lodestar for this bicentennial collection?
As Shelley moved further and further away from England, he remained fascinated by how poetry and art can, and must, bring us together. We thought it was the perfect way not only to invite entry into Shelley — especially by younger readers — by exploring his precociousness but also to investigate his sophisticated theories of interconnection. This is why the essays in our book — and the authors — treat such an array of subjects: because, as we insisted, they are based primarily on Shelley’s own artistry and practice.
We also saw “relation” as an invitation to do what we only just began in the book. For instance, we did not engage Édouard Glissant’s now famous theory on the Caribbean as a space of relationality — the multiple forms of a world in constant motion and transition. Here is one exciting way to expand Shelley by engaging what we argue in the book
The framing also has something to do with our working through our sense of Shelley’s entangled notions of futurity and history — and the sometimes Anglo-American bifurcation between a nineteenth-century historicist Revolutionary Shelley and a contemporary theory-boy Shelley. The more we talked, the more we felt we couldn’t think about Shelley’s notions of multiverse historicity without also thinking about his conceptions of contemporaneity and futurity, to which he then adds all sorts of other temporal and spatial relations. But, perhaps most significantly, we wanted to present the Shelley speaking to and with different audiences and “contexts” and people (and alongside all us interlocutors) across and within different times. It was one of the reasons why we held several panels and roundtables in the US, the UK, and virtually — to foment these conversations through iterative spacetimes. Our goal was to refine our sense of Shelley’s “historicism” and then open it up via thinking about the different forms of relationality his poetics explored, what we came to think of as multi-temporal and interconnected historicisms. We still worried, however, that our readers and interlocutors might understand “arch poet of relation” in a sloppy, melting-pot kind of way. We wanted to emphasize that we were not reaching here for an out-of-touch “wokeness.” We were also keen to try to resist a naive presentism that is looking for a nascent identity politics within Shelley. We hoped that each essay might pose a different constellation of specific relations — that is to say a series of historical and influential coordinates that also thinks critically about Shelley’s method of putting them together at varying junctures.
4) How did you choose how to order and organise the twelve essays?
We thought of multiple ways of arranging the sequence of chapters. We considered, for example, beginning with Mary Fairclough’s essay on action at a distance, which from the inception of the book we felt was a kind of key allegory for Shelley’s relationality. We also considered beginning with Gerard Cohen Vrignaud’s essay on hope and hopelessness to lay to rest the “ineffectual adolescent” stereotype, or beginning with Omar’s piece about Shelley in exile to emphasize the book as a kind of intellectual and material diaspora. But the order we ultimately agreed to envisioned an approach that might invite in academic and younger readers by building first from Shelley’s thinking about concrete relations between particular groups of people and then onto his more abstract thinking about the affects, sciences, ontologies, and other processes that bind us together. We loved the idea of perversely offering Fuson Wang’s essay early on as it reconceptualizes Shelley as a poet of old age and debility, redrawing assumptions about Shelley’s temporal and material predilictions. We were especially interested in confronting questions about Shelley’s complicity in some of the main systems of coercive relations of his day — imperialism, settler colonialism — those perennial questions of whether the liberal-but-potentially-not-radical Shelley was a possibly bad actor in certain regards. What does it mean for Shelley to have remained politically silent on the issue of the Atlantic slave trade, as Mathedlina Nagubodi argues, while his work directly inspired the politics and political theory of indigenous peoples and Black Civil Rights activists, as Nikki Hessell and James Chandler respectively show? Could Shelley offer any guide or inspiration to Black poets and legislators on ways of holding the pain of African enslavement’s wakes, as Julie Carlson considers? Or what about understanding the impulse to harm as a legacy of Enlightenment thought, what Alan Richardson describes as “dark empathy”? These essays precede examinations of larger affective categories of relationality, which several of our authors were separately interested in exploring, including sympathy, hope, and mobility/displacement. The book ends with the broadest of Shelleyan connection-making, as it considers Shelley’s notions of the environment (Ross Wilson’s essay), the opening up of gender through nonbinary and nonhuman being (Kate’s), and the aspirational legacies of how mediation, poetry, and imagination can continue to change a world in which we find ourselves (Joel Faflak’s piece). All the while, the order of chapters from the particular to the more capacious corresponds with our central argument about opening up Shelley to continued future readings through his own art and ideas.
5) What other projects are you each working on?
Kate is working on a new book on shapeshifting tentatively titled Shapeshifting and Models of Change: Race, Queerness, and Disability in Equiano and Beyond. It attempts to rethink how we understand change in the so-called age of revolution by looking at recurring allegories of material and bodily change as they speak to changes in environment, sex-gender systems, enslavement, and the consolidation of medical impairment. It is a way for us to think about alternative models for socio-political and personal change as well as to uncover incipient forms of intersectional being. She is also looking forward to the publication of several edited clusters of essays first written for the Black Studies and Romanticism conference, which think in varying ways about the need for Black Studies approaches within Romantic period literature, as well as an edited special issue on Transing Romanticism that showcases work of young queer and trans scholars, who reveal how a variety of forms of gender crossing rewrite the Romantic period as indelibly one of gender transition — and transitioning understandings about gender-sex systems.
Omar is currently working on a book project provisionally titled, Romantic Exile and the Rise of Global Celebrity. Much like Percy Shelley for Our Times, it aims to open up our scholarly discourses by turning back to the historical moment of Byronic celebrity. It will show how minority artists and activists played a critical role in the industry in which Byron and the craze of Byronism participated – an influence hitherto unacknowledged in our scholarship but overtly acknowledged by Byron himself. Through his examinations of lyric and exile in the period, he is also working on another monograph that tracks an alternative genealogy for the Romantic-era lyric tradition. In 2026, he anticipates publishing a second – and bicentenary – edition of his abridged teaching version of Mary Shelley’s The Last Man.
In the spirit of opening up, moreover, both of us are co-editing another volume alongside Bakary Diaby, Arif Camoglu, and Gaura Narayan: The Routledge Handbook to Global Literature and Culture in the Romantic Era. This collection of over 30 essays will provide an enlarged understanding of the era as a cross-cultural, trans-regional, and transnational set of interlocking aesthetic and political concerns. This includes deliberate attention to oral histories, narratives of rebellion and abolition, and other emancipatory and activist expressions around the globe. The volume departs all the while from conventional transatlantic and transpacific frameworks as well as temporal paradigms corresponding with teleological imperialist conceptual frames by centering the Global South. The volume will be published next year.
