“it is lava of the imagination whose eruption prevents an earth-quake”
Lord Byron, letter to Annabella Milbanke, Nov. 29th 1813
KAILA ROSE
Interdisciplinary Artist, Writer, and Independent Scholar
Literature and painting have never existed as separate pursuits for me. They are simply different ways of asking the same questions. Throughout my life, I have sought out spaces where I can simultaneously lose myself and become more fully myself. When I am fortunate, the work discovers its own medium. Byron recognized something that continues to resonate with me: art is not always something we choose; sometimes it is the only way we know how to inhabit the world. I return to writing —and to painting—for the same reason. Together, they allow me to continue the conversation whenever a single medium alone is not quite enough.
I seem always to live my best Byronic life. As both an artist and academic at heart, I am fascinated by the processes of knowing and by the ways consciousness can become an obstacle to its own self-awareness—or self-becoming. When fleeting feelings surface, I have to write or paint them into existence, releasing a little of my own volcanic fervor rather than risking the earthquake that comes from sitting too long with the fire.
While I had the joy of taking only one formal art class—an oil painting course at Portland Community College while I was still in high school—my education as an artist has always extended far beyond the classroom. My life has been shaped by the aesthetics that inspire me and, in turn, by the ways they teach me to understand the world.
My maternal grandmother—an artist extraordinaire—cultivated this way of seeing from the beginning, encouraging both artistic expression and education in all their forms. My immediate family has likewise taught me to understand the elements of art and how they locate us within the world. My craftsman father as earth, with his remarkable woodworking hands; my spiritual mother as air, having spent her life teaching generations of people how to negotiate the experience of being alive; my sister as water, able to capture fleeting moments through her camera and transform pixels into ever-new forms of thought. I seem to complete this quartet as fire—the spunky youngest and perhaps the most Promethean—capable of bringing warmth and illumination while never forgetting that fire also transforms, scars, and demands respect.
Painters such as Francis Bacon and Willem de Kooning opened before me a visual language that felt immediately familiar: expansive, visceral, and emotionally honest. Their work gave shape to something I had long recognized but could not yet articulate. At the same time, much of my adult life has been devoted to writers, poets, and theorists whose ideas continue to inform both my scholarship and my creative practice. Although my scholarship is rooted in Romantic literature, what continues to draw me to the period is its enduring belief that imagination is not the opposite of reason but another means of arriving at—or exposing—truth.
When I sit before a blank page or canvas, I am not trying to illustrate an idea that already exists. I am trying to discover it. Painting has never been an escape from thinking; it has always been another way of thinking. It is where intuition and analysis meet—where questions that resist language begin to take form through colour, gesture, and composition. Each work becomes less a finished articulation than a record of inquiry, revealing something I could not have known before I began. Perhaps that is why I hoard so many things—paintings, notebooks, loose pages, books, fragments of writing. They are not conclusions so much as companions in an ongoing conversation.
Education
Master of Arts, Department of English, University of Oregon, September 2012.
Thesis: “‘Some Other Being’: The Autobiographical Phantom in Wordsworth and Byron.” Committee: Forest Pyle, Mark Quigley, and Deborah Shapple
Bachelor of Arts, Department of English, University of Oregon, December 2009
Awards, Honors, and Certifications
Conference Award, the International Association of Byron Societies, 44th International Byron Conference, Palazzo Rasponi Dalle Teste, Ravenna, Italy, April 15th 2018
Wine & Spirit Educational Trust Level 2: Empire Merchants, New York, NY. June 2016
Graduate Student Teaching Award, Department of English, The Society of Graduate Students and PSAC Local 610, with the School of Graduate and Postdoctoral Students at the University of Western Ontario, May 2015.
Conferences, Presentations, and Lectures
“in this instance I was not so fortunate as to be prophetic”: Andamento, or the "Prophecy of Byron.” 50th International Byron Conference, Keele U, England, July 2026.
“CIRS: Sparks of the Future Flame for Us All,” Byron Now, Università Ca’ Foscari, Venice, Italy, January 2026.
“Alternative Academic Careers Plenary Roundtable.” BARS ECR & PGR Conference 2025: Romantic (Un)Consciousness. 12th September 2025. Online.
“‘A small drop of ink’: the Link of Ages in Byron Tattoos,” 49th International Byron Conference, Pisa, Italy July 2025.
“The Future of Nineteenth-Century Author-Based Societies: Report,” Byron Now, Università Ca’ Foscari, Venice, Italy, January 2025.
“The Future of Nineteenth-Century Author-Based Societies,” MLA, New Orleans, January 2025.
“‘Between two worlds life hovers like a star’: A Byronic Exploration of our Alien World and the Social Responsibility of Pop Art's Influence.”48th International Byron Conference, Greece, July 2024.
“‘Uncloseting Byron’: A Mixed-Media Literary Vassal to Our Liege Lord.” Byron Now, Università Ca’ Foscari, Venice, Italy, January 2024.
“Futures in the New Worlds: The Conclusion of the IABS’s 47th Annual Conference.”47th International Byron Conference, USF, California, August 2023.
"Color me Mad & Bad: Byron in Contemporary Art." Byron Society Lecture Series, The Byron Society, 15th February 2023. Online.
“Byron: '23 and Me, Byron Now,” Università Ca’ Foscari, Venice, Italy, January 2023.
“‘A Secondary and Neglected Object': Musings of Loss in Byron's 'Detached Thoughts.” Newstead AbbeyByron Conference, Newstead Abbey, UK, April 2022.
“‘Born for Opposition: Byron and the Revolutions of the New Poetic Combatants.” 46th International Byron Conference, Aristotle U of Thessaloniki, Greece, June 2021.
“To Gaze Upon Him: Punctum and Marring Elements of Byron in Art Now.” Byron Now, Università Ca’ Foscari, Venice, Italy, January 2020. Conference Presentation.
“‘Five bits of lead’: Punctum and Byron in Art Now.” Byron’s Don Juan: A Romantic Bicentennial Symposium, DePaul University, Chicago, October 2019. Conference Presentation.
“Fiction: Byron in the Age of Fake News and its Poetic Combatants.” Byron Now, Università Ca’ Foscari, Venice, Italy, January 2019. Conference Presentation.
“To Cut.” Transformation of a Pattern: Poetry Reading. Yi Gallery, New York, September 28 2018.
“‘This is a fact and no poetic fable’: Mobilizing Byron’s Political ‘Hints’ in Correspondences and Don Juan Canto V.” 44th International Byron Conference, Palazzo Rasponi Dalle Teste, Ravenna, Italy, July 2018. Conference Presentation.
“‘Within the Eye of the Volcanoes’: Transposing Worldly and Poetic Shock in Byron’s ‘Epistle to Augusta,’ ‘Prometheus,’ and ‘Darkness.’” 42nd International Byron Conference, Fondation del Duca, Paris, France, July 2016. Conference Presentation.
“Survival and Autobiography: Byron’s Ruination in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage Canto IV.” Survival: 25th Annual Conference for the Center of Comparative Literature, University of Toronto, March 2015. Conference Presentation.
“‘There comes a time . . . when nothing matters’: Interpreting Signs and Not Mattering in Cicely Hamilton’s William––An Englishman.” Regulating the Edwardian Body. Western University, March 2015. Seminar Presentation.
“We Can’t Just Breed the Studs and Kill the Duds: C.W. Saleeby’s Ethics of Eugenics.” Regulating the Edwardian Body. Western University, March 2015. Seminar Presentation.
“Finding a Poetics of Alliance: mamâhtâwisiwin, âniskwâpitamâcimowin, and Lummi as Guiding Theories of Indigenous Poetics.” Indigenous Critical Theory. Western University, March 2015. Seminar Presentation.
“The Stillness of Dynamic Tension: Coleridge’s ‘Frost at Midnight’ and Chapters 13 & 14 of Biographia Literaria.” Futures of Romanticism. Western University, January 2015. Seminar Presentation.
“What’s Happening with 4.4?: The Winter’s Tale and Bohemia.” Shakespeare and Performance Choices. Western University, December 2014. Lecture.
“‘borne away / a human being’: Mediating Disaster in Wordsworth’s The Ruined Cottage.” Romanticism and Happiness. Western University, November 2014. Seminar Presentation.
“Deconstruction II: How Can We Resist Paul de Man?” Critical Theory. Western University, October 2014. Seminar Presentation.
“Richard III and the Abject.” Shakespeare and Performance Choices. Western University, October 2014. Lecture.
“Settler Colonialism: Patrick Wolfe and Lorenzo Veracini.” Indigenous Critical Theory. Western University, September 2014. Seminar Presentation.
“What Then?: Transgressions and (Re)collections in Byron’s Don Juan.” Collecting Byron Conference, Drew University, New Jersey, April 2014. Conference Presentation.
“Peer Review Strategies.” Annual Composition Conference. Department of English: Composition Program. University of Oregon, September 2013. Conference Presentation.
“The Politics of Autobiography: Byron’s ‘Other Being’ and the Ruination of Poetic Subjectivity in Childe Harold’s PilgrimageCantos III & IV.” 39th International Byron Conference, King’s College, London, July 2013. Conference Presentation.
“‘I and I’”: Losing to the Symbolic Order in Richard III.” University of Oregon, December 2011. Conference Presentation.
Publications
Unpleasant Angles: A Collection of Poetry and Paintings. Poetica Press, 2021
“‘Byron in 1821: A Retrospective’ MLA Annual Convention.” The Byron Journal, vol 49.1, Liverpool UP, 2021, 95-8. Print.
“To Cut.” 2018. Yi Gallery & Shop, Yi Gallery. https://gallery-yi.com/events/5/.
“Show 26 - From Byron With Love.” Audio blog post. Soundcloud. Bar the Shouting, 14, February 2018.
“‘The Hideous Dropping off of the Veil’: The Uncanny in Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher.” Nomad: The Undead Edition. Ed. Max Rayneard. The Comparative Literature Program’s Journal of Undergraduate Writing, University of Oregon, 2009. 65-76. Print.
Event Organization
Co-Organizer, Stuart Curran Symposium for the Keats-Shelley Association of America, NYU, October 25th 2024
Co-Organizer, New Worlds, 47th Annual Conference, International Association of Byron Societies, University San Francisco, California, August 2023.
Organizer, 50th Anniversary Dinner for the Byron Society of America, Alice Restaurant NYC, January 2023.
Co-Organizer, Byron Now, Università Ca’ Foscari, Venice, Italy, January 2020.
Co-Organizer, Byron’s Don Juan: A Romantic Bicentennial Symposium, DePaul University, Chicago, October 2019.
Co-Organizer, Byron Now, Università Ca’ Foscari, Venice, Italy, January 2019.
Member
The International Association of Byron Societies, Board Member, Communications Officer
The Byron Society of America, Board Member, Outreach Coordinator
Modern Language Association
Keats-Shelley Association of America, Director of Operations & Communications
North American Society for the Study of Romanticism
British Association for Romantic Studies
Wordsworth-Coleridge Association
Ezra Pound Society
Blake Society
International Association of Writers & Editors