Participation in panel discussion on the sessions of Byron and the Mediterranean “Cult of the South”: a Bicentennial Symposium

Our contribution was in the discussion panels with the presenters of the conference developing the dialogue about Byron and his legacy in these parts of the world.This event, co-sponsored by the University of Notre Dame and the University of Colorado Boulder, took place at the University of Notre Dame.
World renowned academics and Byron experts were speakers on the Symposium devoted to 200 years of the death of Lord Byron. The presenters expanded upon Marilyn Butler's seminal investigation of a romantic "cult of the south'' to address Byron's personal, poetic, and political interactions with a wider range of cultures throughout the Mediterranean Rim: Portugal, Spain, Albania, Greece, the Balkans, and Turkey, as well as Italy. This broader cultural focus opened new critical pathways for exploring a large array of revolutionary aesthetic and political initiatives crucial to the development ofEuropean Romanticism and highly relevant for our own historical moment two centuries later.