Abstract: The report details The Robert Graves Society’s panel at the Modern Language Association and offers precis of the papers, with references to their appearance in this issue of The Robert Graves Review and the availability of video recordings online. It also previews next year’s Robert Graves Society panel at the 2026 MLA convention.

Keywords: Modern Language Association, invisibility, I, Claudius, Islands of Unwisdom, epistolary verse, children’s poetry, Siegfried Sassoon,

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In 2025, The Robert Graves Society fielded a panel at Visibility, the Modern Language Association (MLA) convention in New Orleans, USA (9-12 January 2025), our second panel since becoming an Allied Organization in 2023. Dana L. Williams, the MLA President, asked prospective panels to consider ‘what humanities work can do to make visible that which has been hidden, obscured, or overlooked – across scholarship in race, disability, archives, marginalized literatures, power structures, and more’. Anett Jessop and I adapted that theme in a call for papers asking scholars to think about topics of visibility, visuality, and visible clues in the prose fiction and poetry of Robert Graves, and we took for the title of our panel: ‘(Re)Marking the Invisible in the Work of Robert Graves’.

In the CFP we suggested several approaches and received a number of strong proposals from people who had spoken on previous MLA panels as well as newcomers to Graves studies. Following are the four proposals we selected: Professor Joseph T. Thomas, Jr. (San Diego State University), discussed the poems in The Penny Fiddle: Poems for Children render the child reader visible and distinctive, in ‘Envisioning the Invisible: The Child within and without Robert Graves’s The Penny Fiddle’. Reading off the poems selected or written for The Penny Fiddle, Thomas examined how the text constructs the child ‘both as a recurring figure within the poems and as an implied, discerning reader’. Jonahs Kneitly, a graduate student at Texas A & M University, who, like Joseph, appeared on our 2024 (inaugural) MLA panel, discussed the unreliable male observer / narrator, Don Juan and how he renders the novel’s female protagonist, Don Álvaro de Mendaña, simultaneously visible and invisible in the understudied (near-invisible) novel The Islands of Unwisdom; Adriana Marinelli, also a graduate student, studying classics at the University of Naples, discussed how Graves adapts classical sources to create female characters in I, Claudius, focusing specifically on Claudius’s mother, Antonia, in her paper, ‘Crafting Female Characters in I, Claudius: Robert Graves and the Ancient Historians’. While identifying classical sources in the character of Antonia, Adriana points out that as many of Graves’s female characters, she emerges as a complex individual inhabiting a modern world. Our fourth speaker, Professor Richard Allen Kaye (Hunter College, City University of New York), focused on the ‘vexed’ relationship between Sassoon and Graves. His talk foregrounded Graves’s enigmatic decision to render Sassoon’s homosexuality somewhat visible when seeking to publish Sassoon’s ‘Dear Roberto’ poem (24 July 1918) in Good-Bye to All That. His ‘Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon, and the Hidden Anxieties of Postwar Homoerotic Revelation’, also shone a light on problematic social attitudes toward homosexuality in the Postwar period in Britain and the waves they caused in Graves and Sassoon’s postwar friendship.

The panel not only drew proposals from a number of scholars who previously had not participated in Society activities, but drew a larger audience than in the past, suggesting that Graves studies are becoming more attractive or better-known to American and European researchers. Anett and I are committed to building on that success and raising ‘Graves consciousness’ in future MLA panels.

Although last year’s papers were subsequently published as notes in The Robert Graves Review (2024), our panelists chose to develop their papers into articles to submit as critical studies, and all but Jonahs, who is in the process of revising his research, appear as critical studies in this year’s issue. As both Richard presented a paper at the 2024 Robert Graves conference in Oxford, he needs no introduction to the Robert Graves Society, but we can bid him an official welcome to the pages of The Robert Graves Review.

As in the past, we videorecorded the presentations and made them available on YouTube. However, Richard asked that his video be removed as a work in progress. The playlist can be found at <https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLxSJdULph-jsaT4yU0Z683b-kK9TfNA6c> [accessed 27 July 2025]

‘The Didactic Mr Graves,’ our panel for the 2026 MLA convention (Toronto, 8-11 January), its 141st, is already in place. Once again we have a full table of four panelists including Adriana Marinelli and Joseph Thomas, Jr, who will be presenting on didactic elements in Graves’s ‘Creweian Oration’ and children’s poems, respectively, along with Paul Robichaud, who will be speaking on ‘Robert Graves and the Lessons of Poetic Thought,’ and Lissa Paul, who will be looking at how Graves introduced British children’s poetry to modernism. Professor Robichaud is from Albertus Magnus College, and Professor Paul from Brock University. She is also an Elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (Academy of Arts and Humanities).

Anybody who would like to attend ‘The Didactic Mr Graves’ but prefers not to register for the entire conference will be able to do so. Please get in touch with Anett or me, and we will be happy to facilitate your visit.

Michael Joseph is professor Emeritus at Rutgers University, and editor of The Robert Graves Review. He is co-editor of Heroines of the Postmodern and their Worlds in Contemporary Historical Fiction forthcoming from Routledge.