Percy Shelley for Our Times

 On Thursday 6th July at 5 pm the Keats-Shelley House invites you to a lecture by Dr Omar Miranda on Percy Bysshe Shelley's relevance to contemporary issues.

Even two centuries after Percy Shelley’s death, his writings still resonate with pressing social and political issues. Shelley addressed climate change, women’s liberation, nonbinary gender, and peaceful mass assembly, while speaking to indigenous, queer/trans, differently-abled, displaced, and working-class communities. His works continue to inspire artists and social justice movements around the world, as he anticipated the struggles of our age. In this talk, Dr Omar F. Miranda (University of San Francisco) will discuss Percy Shelley for Our Times, the forthcoming volume from Cambridge University Press that he is co-editing alongside Dr Kate Singer (Mt. Holyoke College). He will then focus on his own chapter in the book, which situates Percy Shelly's Prometheus Unbound in the socio-political contexts of the Romantic “age of exile.” Dr Miranda argues that the drama centers on what Shelley calls “sad exile,” a phrase that deliberately toggles between the archaic and traditional meanings of “sad” as both sorrowful and steadfast. In the play, sad exile registers as an ambivalent process, one that neither ends nor anticipates a return to a former state or place. Rather, it becomes fundamental to maintaining the renovated society's mutually-determined livelihood.

Dr Omar F. Miranda (Associate Professor, University of San Francisco) is editor of On the 200th Anniversary of Lord Byron's Manfred; an abridged edition of Mary Shelley’s The Last Man; and co-editor of the forthcoming volume, Percy Shelley for Our Times. His article, ‘The Global Romantic Lyric’ (The Wordsworth Circle, 2021) recently won the Bigger 6 2021 Article of the Year award, and his book manuscript in progress tracks the rise of global celebrity culture in the Romantic period. He is Vice President of the Keats-Shelley Association of America and director of the Byron Society of America.