Acknowledgments

Percy Shelley for Our Times adopts the spirit of our volume’s main argument: it is a product of connections and collaborations across times and places. First and foremost, we must thank all our authors for engaging in the many conversations, presentations, and revisions that have yielded a collection of essays that we hope will steer Percy Shelley studies forward in the years to come. We are indebted to several collegial and nurturing spaces that allowed us to test out many of our ideas, including a Shelley200 Online Event (June 2022) and the Shelley Conference (Keats House, Hampstead, London, July 2022), both expertly organized by Anna Mercer, Bysshe Coffey, Amanda Blake Davis, and Paul Stephens, with the assistance of Laura Blunsden and Ana Romanelli; a Modern Language Association 2020 roundtable on the 200th anniversary of Prometheus Unbound (Seattle, Washington, January 2020); a North American Society for the Study of Romanticism (NASSR)/British Association for Romantic Studies (BARS) 2022 panel (Edge Hill University, Ormskirk, UK, August 2022) that included some epic technical difficulties (we prevailed); a NASSR 2023 seminar (Sam Houston State University, Texas, March 2023); Columbia University’s Nineteenth-Century British Literature Colloquium (organized by Johanna King-Slutzky and Conor Bruce MacVarish); and an Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies (INCS) panel on “The Shelleys” (Knoxville, Tennessee, April 2023). Thank you to Emma Watkins, our sagacious, patient, and talented copy editor, for your adept skill at helping to bring the language in these pages into their stylistic and coherent elegance. We are appreciative of the financial support generously extended by Mount Holyoke College and University of San Francisco, which included grants for research assistantships, travel funding to conferences, and indexing services. With gratitude, as well, to Bethany Thomas, George Laver, and Sunantha Ramamoorthy from Cambridge University Press for your flexibility, openness, guidance, and enthusiasm. We are thankful for the socially, environmentally, and Shelleyan-conscious artwork of Janet Allsebrook as well as for the generosity of the artist herself for permitting us to mark this collection visually with the interwoven Shelleyan concepts at its core. Of course, there were also many individuals who read pieces of this volume and listened to late-night and far-flung interpretations and dreams of new worlds: Suzanne Barnett, Madeleine Callaghan, Bysshe Coffey, Julie A. Carlson, Gerard Cohen-Vrignaud, Stuart Curran, Neil Fraistat, Anna Mercer, Alan Richardson, Sharon Ruston, Ross Wilson, Fuson Wang, and Amy Wong.

This journey would have been neither possible nor meaningful without our mutually enriching and invigorating editorial collective of two. Our work together included “several” texting exchanges and phone conversations as well as many virtual and in-person presentations and teaching sessions, including a literature seminar, “Percy Shelley’s Life, Works, and Afterlives,” taught at the Department of English, University of San Francisco (Spring 2022).

And, of course, to Joey, Chris, Bue, Dolores, and Norman (as well as our sustaining plants), we give you back all our Shelleyan zeal for the privilege of the best kind of involvements.