Keynote Speakers

Patricia Matthew

Patricia Matthew is Associate Professor of British Literature at Montclair State University where she specializes in nineteenth-century British literature and culture. She has edited and co-edited Written/Unwritten: Diversity and the Hidden Truths of Tenure (UNC Press, 2016), as well as journal issues of Romantic Pedagogy Commons, Studies in Romanticism, and the European Romantic Review. She is also currently co-editor of Race in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture (Oxford New Press Series), and the editor of Mansfield Park (The Norton Library). In addition to publishing in academic journals, she has written for The Times Literary Supplement, and The Atlantic, Lapham’s Quarterly. Dr. Matthew has been a Center for Diversity Innovation Distinguished Visiting Scholar at SUNY Buffalo (2020-2021) and an Anthony E. Kaye Fellow at the National Humanities Center (2022-2023). Her forthcoming work includes the “Pride and Prejudice in the 21st Century” lecture (Wondrium/audible.com), and her current book project—“And freedom to the slave:” Sugar and the Afterlives of Abolition—is the first Black feminist exploration of Britain’s gendered abolitionist culture and sugar boycotts (forthcoming from Princeton University Press). 

Kate Singer

Kate Singer is a Mary Lyon Professor of Literature at Mount Holyoke College and President of the Keats-Shelley Association of America. Her research centers upon material and figurative transmissions of gender, race, and sexuality in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature, and how such transmissions move through affect, media, and nonhuman and human ecologies. She is the author of Romantic Vacancy: The Poetics of Gender, Affect, and Radical Speculation (SUNY Press, 2019), which argues that authors and poets of the Romantic period countered gendered notions of sensibility through figurative responses that connect human and nonhuman movements of the body and mind within nature. She also co-edited Material Transgressions: Beyond Romantic Bodies, Genders, Things (LUP, 2020) and is jointly editing Percy Shelley for our Times (Cambridge University Press, 2024), as well as the new Routledge Handbook to Global Romanticism and Culture. Her current book project traces nonbinary change and shape shifting within and beyond the Romantic Era.