Carl H. Pforzheimer, Jr., Research Grants

Diana Little is a Ph.D student at Princeton University. She is the recipient of one of our 2024 grants in support of her project Imperial Erosions: The Geological Poetics of Empire, 1780-1850.

By investigating both the technical and cultural aspects of chalk mining, this project contributes insights into the uses of geology to justify political boundary-setting, resource appropriation and environmental exploitation as well the efforts by poets such as Anna Barbauld, Charlotte Smith and William Wordsworth to protest these developments. It is notable for connecting these concerns by British writers with concerns by American and Ojibwe writers and for adding a new layer of research and analysis to scholarship on Romantic-era geology. 

Imperial Erosions is the kind of project that combines the best of ecological thinking with studies of human activities, including colonial incursions and commercial mining at home, to produce something utterly new. Little’s clever framing of her project as elements in the rock cycle demonstrates her core idea that geology shapes human space and therefore human imagination, both of which are subject to the seismic upheavals we find in Romantic poetry and politics.

Paul Stephens is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Oxford University. He is the recipient of one of our 2024 grants in support of his project Romanticism and the Cost of Living.

By examining 'the cost of living' as both a material and philosophical concern, this project sheds new light on the financial pressures affecting the works of five core Romantic-era writers (Thomas De Quincey, William Godwin, Charles Lamb, Mary Shelley and Charlotte Smith). The relevance of its attention to values, debt, security and identity extends into the present time as economic precarity again pressures intellectual labor. Stephens addresses authors at the center of our literary canon, interrogating the way writings we all know were shaped by the experience of debt and poverty. 

The project brings economic questions to bear on financial documents, including ledgers and bills, using core methodologies of close reading and cultural interpretation.

Francesca Mackenney is currently undertaking an AHRC International Placement at the Library of Congress. Her project explores the representation of fens, bogs and swamps in nineteenth-century British and American Literature. Focusing especially on the writings of John Clare (1793-1864) and Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), her research traces a complex set of transatlantic ties: colonial expansion and the diaspora of peoples to North America, a rapid increase in wetland drainage schemes and the exploitation of natural resources, and the concomitant emergence of environmental thought and literature. The grant will enable her to view archival materials at Concord Free Public Library, Concord Museum, New York Public Library and the Morgan Library. Her work in this area follows the recent publication of her first book, Birdsong, Speech and Poetry: The Art of Composition in the Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge University Press: 2022).

Ifemu Omari is a PhD Candidate at the University of Wolverhampton, whose research examines nineteenth-century slave narratives. Her award will support her project “The Dynamics of Colourism between Black Women and Mixed-Race Women in Nineteenth-Century Antigua.” By moving beyond black-white oppositions to investigate how people of mixed race regarded, and were regarded by, others in nineteenth-century Antigua, her project on “colourism” will add nuance, complexity, and depth to our understanding of racial conflict in The History of Mary Prince and the world in which she lived. Omari plans to visit the Antigua National Archives and the Antiguan House of Assembly to read private papers and letters, as well as minutes from the meetings of the Antiguan House of Assembly, in order to investigate the attitude of colonists towards coloured Antiguans.

Valentina Aparicio is a Lecturer in Romanticism at Queen Mary University of London. Her research focuses on Romantic British, Latin American, and Caribbean literary exchanges from a decolonial perspective. She is currently studying the narratives of five Scottish women who visited Latin America in the long-nineteenth century, focusing on how they depicted the women they met and befriended. Valentina analyses the extent to which these travellers identified and sympathised with Latin American women, the limitations of these relationships, and whether their ideas on race, gender, and class were challenged by these encounters. The project aims at offering a foundation for decolonised studies of Romantic and Victorian travel narratives by using Latin American feminist theory and critical whiteness studies to interpret their portrayal of the continent.

Elisa Cozzi is a D.Phil. candidate in English Language and Literature at the Queen's College, Oxford. Her project, “Italy and the Irish Romantics: Networks, Nations, and Literary Encounters, 1798-1848” explores the literary connections between Italy and Ireland in the Romantic Period, with a focus on the Irish exiles within the extended Byron-Shelley Circle. Elisa plans to examine the Mount Cashell-Tighe-Cini Papers in the Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle, and the Papers of Mary Tighe and Sydney Owenson at the National Library of Ireland.

Bysshe Coffey is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at Newcastle University. His British Academy research project examines the phenomenon of ‘High Shelleyanism’, and the differing ideologies and methodologies of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s numerous editors, amateur and professional. It charts the diffusion of Shelley’s works through cheap reprints, illustration, music and networks of influence. Bysshe is constructing an annotated digital gallery of illustrated editions of Shelley, visual representations of the poet, and musical settings of his verse between the years 1851-1922. The website, which is in its initial stages, will go live in 2021.

Leila Walker (CUNY, Queen’s College) is an Emerging Technologies and Digital Scholarship Librarian. Leila is currently working on a rigorous digital scholarly edition of Elizabeth Kent’s Flora Domestica. In its time, Flora Domestica was one of the more successful publications to come out of the Cockney Circle. Yet no scholarly edition of this hybrid text, which offers a literary anthology in the guise of a botanical resource, is currently available. Leila’s digital edition will enable wider study of Kent’s writing and a richer understanding of the interrelated roles of gender, science, literary history, and social networks in Romantic poetry. Moreover, by centering Kent, a woman author working in a feminized field, positioned at the margins of her literary circle, the social network analysis made possible by a TEI-encoded digital edition will facilitate a better understanding Romanticism’s sociable intertextuality without re-inscribing dominant narratives.

Samantha Nystrom is a doctoral candidate at the University of Delaware. Her dissertation, Constructing Locality: Rooting Nineteenth-Century British Novels in Garden Culture, will argue that gardens and novels intersect as ways of configuring and conceiving of a larger British community. In a chapter that discusses Scott’s Waverley, she explores how Scott’s appropriation of material from a twelfth-century abbey for his Abbotsford garden has meaningful parallels in his literary project. The grant will fund fieldwork at Abbotsford and Melrose Abbey as well as research at the Scottish National Library and Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh.

Deven Parker received her Ph.D. from the University of Colorado, Boulder, last spring, and she is currently expanding and revising her dissertation for a book project called Revolutions in Communication: The Politics of Mediation in Romantic Literature. In it, she will scrutinize a variety of English communication networks from the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, contending that these networks operated as sites of political power and surveillance as well as disruption and resistance. The grant will fund her research at the National Archives, British Postal Museum, and other locations, where she hopes to explore papers relevant to transatlantic packet networks and the Pitt administration’s development of the optical telegraph.

Padma Rangarajan, who formerly taught at the University of Colorado, Boulder, became an Assistant Professor at UC Riverside this past July. She is currently working on a monograph bearing the title Thug Life: The British Empire and the Birth of Terrorism, which posits that the discourse over what constitutes illegitimate political violence can only be properly understood by acknowledging the nation state’s historical correlative, modern imperialism. The Grant will underwrite her research trip to Dublin and London. For a chapter which considers representations of the 1798 Irish Rebellion and resistance networks between Ireland and India, she will explore the Rebellion Papers Collection at the National Archives of Ireland; for another chapter, in which she will tease out the implications of Burke’s “Indianism and Jacobinism,” with a special focus on “Tiger” Tipu Sultan, ruler of Mysore, she will explore the extensive papers and cultural ephemera at the British Library connected with this figure.

Kacie Wills, who received her degree there last September, is currently working as an Instructional Specialist at Lane Community College. The grant will fund her travel to London for archival research at the British Library and the British Museum, which will provide the foundation for her later use of digital tools to provide wider access to the scrapbook on hot-air balloons assembled by Sarah Sophia Banks, sister of the famed botanist Joseph Banks. This online resource will uncover and establish connections to the Romantic fascination with the balloon and illustrate a way of thinking about materiality, significance, science and spectacle, displayed in the popular culture of the period and in the writings of Percy and Mary Shelley, among others. The balloon scrapbook will form just one segment of a larger digital archive, already in embryo, currently titled “Exploring the Collections of Sarah Sophia Banks.”

Olivia Loksing Moy and Marco Ramírez Rojas, Assistant Professors of English and Spanish respectively at Lehman College, are the first winners to receive a grant for collaborative work. Their project, “Keats in Argentina: Translating Julio Cortázar’s Imagen de John Keats,” undertakes the first English translation of Cortázar’s meditation on the poet, which marks a major turning point in the Latin-American reception of Keats.

A Research Facilitator at Roehampton University, Beatrice Turner is working on “Godwin Among the Books: Essay on Sepulchres and Relics of Feeling.” She will travel to the Abinger Collection and the Pforzheimer Collection to consult archival materials bearing on how Godwin’s use of books informed his thinking about the affective significance of objects generally.

An independent scholar currently living in India, Hrileena Ghosh received her doctorate from St. Andrew’s in 2016. For her project, “John Keats’s Medical Years and the Poet’s Career,” she will use the grant to consult hospital records at King’s College and the Metropolitan Archives in London, as well as in the Astley Cooper materials at Manchester University Library.

Triona O’Hanlon, a post-doctoral fellow at Queen’s University, Belfast, holds a degree in music. Her interdisciplinary project, “Thomas Moore’s Lalla Rookh: Reception and Influence in Nineteenth-Century Europe,” surveys Moore’s widespread popularity as an Irish poet-songwriter. She will travel to the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, a repository of editions, translations, and music materials, to explore the influence of Lalla Rookh on five European composers, including Robert Schumann.

Will Bowers, Junior Research Fellow at Merton College, Oxford, is working on “The Italian Idea: Anglo-Italian Radical Literary Culture, 1818-1824.” It has a chapter on the Pisan Circle, their immersion in Italy, its culture and Italian literature published in London. He plans to study two unexamined works by George Tighe in the Pforzheimer Collection and the annotated books by Leigh Hunt at University of Iowa.

Assistant professor of English at Ohio State U, Jacob Risinger’s project, “Confirmed Tranquillity: Transatlantic Romanticism and the Stoic Tradition,” challenges the alignment of Romanticism with “fresh and authentic feeling” by exploring how a range of British and American writers confronted the limitations of sympathy and their own relations to a cosmopolitan and war-torn world. Holdings in Dr. Williams’ Library in London helps him assess the status of Stoicism in the Dissenting public sphere, its impact on Godwin, and its complex legacy in the works of Byron and Shelley.

A postdoc in the Centre for the History of the Book at U of Edinburgh, Stephanie Dumke is a specialist in Anglo-German literary relations during the Romantic period, researching this during her grant tenure.

Emma Peacocke used the grant to research a book-length study of “Romanticism and the University” in Britain, including undergraduate prize essays and poems. A collateral project focuses on Thomas Campbell, magazine editor, public lecturer, advocate for the foundation of a non-denominational university in London, and a hugely popular Rector of the University of Glasgow.

University of Minnesota graduate student Tom Cannavino’s project, “Lamia‘s Romantic Body: Denaturalizing Sex in Keats,” considers Lamia‘s expression of the anxiety of sexual difference in light of Romantic-era medical literature on the nature of sex and gender.

Assistant Professor of English at Notre Dame U, Ian Newman is developing a book The Tavern: Literature, Politics & Conviviality, and is a contributing editor to the Keats Letters Project. His recent essay is “Civilizing Taste: ‘Sandman Joe,’ the Bawdy Ballad and Metropolitan Improvement,” Eighteenth-Century Studies (2015).

Associate Professor of English at Stonehill College, Matthew Borushko has also won the Keats-Shelley Assoc. prize for the best essay of 2013 for “The Politics of Subreption: Resisting the Sublime in Shelley’s ‘Mont Blanc’” (Studies in Romanticism). Publications after the Pforzheimer tenure include “Aesthetics of Nonviolence: Shelley, Adorno, Rancière.” in his edited collection The Politics of Shelley: History, Theory, Form, Romantic Circles Praxis Series (2015), and “History, Historicism, and Agency at Byron’s Ismail,” ELH (2014).

Now project Manager at the Centre for the History of Human Emotions at Queen Mary U., London, Helen Stark was a Ph.D student at Newcastle U, when she was funded for Nation-making and Nation-breaking: Masculinities in European Literature, 1760-1820, which traces the evolution of the relationship between masculinity and the European nation.

As Assistant Professor U Pittsburgh, Thora Brylowe was funded for research at the Folger, the Philadelphia Free Library, and the Yale Center for British Art for Print, Paint, Poem: The Sister Arts as Cultural Practice, exploring the complex interrelations of authorship, painting, print technology, and poetry in the Romantic period. She is now Assistant Professor at U Colorado, Boulder.

Assistant Professor at Mount Holyoke, Katherine Singer was funded to explore holdings in the Berg and Pforzheimer Collections at the New York Public Library for a book project Against Sensibility: British Women Poets, Romantic Vacancy, and Skepticism, on the resistance of women writers to culturally embedded notions of sympathy and high feeling.

Assistant Professor at Sam Houston State U, Michael Demson was funded for research on Shelley’s Mask of Anarchy. From his work at the Pforzheimer Collection he developed Masks of Anarchy: The Story of a Radical Poem, from Percy Shelley to the Triangle Factory Fire (Verso 2013). A pamphlet he found in the collection generated “Remembering John Cahuac: Post-Peterloo Repression and the Fate of Radical-Romantic Satire” (Romantic Circles 2015). A digital edition with other texts by Cahuac is in development, as is a collection of essays, co-edited with Regina Hewitt, Peterloo and the Violence of Romanticism.

Ali McGhee, PhD candidate at U Rochester, was funded for research at the National Gallery and National Library in Kingston, Jamaica, to explore the effects of anxieties about slavery, witchcraft, contamination, and nineteenth-century Jamaican festival culture on different Romantic novels for her dissertation, “Undead Slaves and Cannibal Gods.” She is the co-author with Rachel Lee of a Romantic Circlesarticle on digital editions of Blake.

Greg Murrie, Ph.D. candidate at U Sydney, has written articles and reviews on gay identity and theater. His funding supported work on his dissertation, “The Interconnections Between Animal Rights, Radical Religious Movements and Evolutionary Theories in the British Long 19th Century.”

A member of the literature Faculty at Sarah Lawrence College, Fiona Wilson has written articles on contemporary Scottish women’s poetry, James Hogg, and Byron. The grant assisted research for a book in progress, Byron and Scotland: The Journey.

A College Lecturer at Oxford when he received a grant for work toward William Godwin and the Theatre (Pickering & Chatto 2010), David O’Shaughnessy is now Assistant Professor at the School of English, Trinity College, Dublin. He has published articles on Godwin and the theater, and co-edited the digital edition of The Diary of William Godwin.

Assistant Professor of English at Boston U, Joseph Rezek was funded for research on his UCLA dissertation at the National Library in Dublin, which led to London and the Making of Provincial Literature: Aesthetics and the Transatlantic Book Trade, 1800-1850 (U Pennsylvania P, 2015). This research also produced a catalogue essay, “Transatlantic Connections in the Early Nineteenth Century,” in “The Cracked Looking Glass”: An Exhibition of the Leonard L. Milberg Collection of Irish Prose at Princeton University (2011). A related essay on transatlantic romanticism appears in ELH 2011.

Assistant Professor at U Arkansas when funded for work on her first book, The Development of Byron’s Philosophy of Knowledge (Palgrave, 2010), Emily A. Bernhard Jackson is now a Lecturer at the U Exeter. Her articles have appeared in The Byron Journal, Spenser Studies, SEL, European Romantic Review, and Victorian Review. She is currently working on a book about nineteenth-century medicine and literature.

Noah Comet has published Romantic Hellenism and Women Writers (Palgrave 2013), developed from his dissertation at UCLA, for which he received funding. An article on Felicia Hemans’s Modern Greece appeared in the Keats-Shelley Journal in 2009. He is Assistant Professor at the U.S. Naval Academy.

A dissertation student at Brown U when he received the award for “Framing Romanticism: Roberts, Shelley, and the Sublimity of the Other,” Manu Chander is now Assistant Professor, Rutgers U, Newark, with articles on art, poetry, and aesthetics. He is working on Brown Romantics, a book about the influence of British Romanticism in India and the Americas.

Lecturer at U Saskatchewan when she applied for funding for “Sketching the British Landscape en Plein Air: The Visual Art Origins of Dorothy Wordsworth’s Painterly Prose,” Suzanne Stewart is now Assistant Professor at St. Francis Xavier U, Nova Scotia. With several articles on intersections of literature and visual art (involving, variously, Dorothy Wordsworth and John Constable, William Wordsworth and J. M. W. Turner), she is now collaborating on Literature Transfigured: Judeo-Christian Perspectives on Reading and Criticism.

An independent scholar in England, Peter Cochran was funded for an electronic edition of Robert Bloomfield’s The Farmer’s Boy. He has edited several volumes on Byron’s relationship to the theater, to London, to the Gothic tradition, and to Orientalism, as well as Teresa Guiccioli’s Lord Byron’s Life in Italy. His online publications include “Byron and Shelley: Radical Incompatibles” in Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net, an edition of Hobhouse’s diary, and a Byron-centric website, which offers texts of Byron’s letters and works edited from the manuscripts.

An Assistant Professor when funded for the project that produced articles anticipating Romantic Antiquity: Rome in the British Imagination, 1789-1832 (Oxford UP, 2010), Jonathan Sachs is now Associate Professor at Concordia U. His new work is on the concept of cultural decline in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

An independent scholar and librarian at the Mercer Library of the Royal College of Surgeons in Dublin, Ireland, Ronan Kelly was in New York City on a Fulbright Postdoc when he was funded for work on Bard of Erin: The Life of Thomas Moore (Penguin 2008), shortlisted for the Glen Dimplex New Writers Award and named an Irish Times and Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year. He is a contributor to Commemorating Writers in Europe, 1800-1916, ed. Leerssen and Rigney (Palgrave, 2014).

Lecturer in English Literature at Oxford when funded for “The Cultural Reception of Byron in Nineteenth-Century America,” Matthew Scott is now Lecturer at U Reading, with essays in Romantic Circles and European Romantic Review. A contributor to the Year’s Work in English Studies and the Oxford Handbook of Coleridge Studies, he has also edited Wordsworth in American Literary Culture (with Joel Pace, Palgrave, 2005).

Assistant Professor at Brigham Young University when funded for work towards Literary Marketing and the Shaping of British Romanticism (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), Nicholas Mason is now Professor of English at Brigham Young University. His other publications include an anthology of Romantic-era satire, a 6-volume Pickering and Chatto edition of highlights from early Blackwood’s, and a co-edited Romantic Circles edition of William Wordsworth’s Guide to the Lakes.

A Ph.D. student at the U Iowa when he received funding for “Jane Porter and Poland,” Thomas McLean is now a Senior Lecturer at U Otago, New Zealand. In addition to articles on Jane Porter, Joanna Baillie, and the representation of Eastern Europe in British Romanticism, he is the author of The Other East and Nineteenth-Century British Literature (Palgrave, 2012) and the editor of Further Letters of Joanna Baillie (2010).

When funded for Plagiarism and Literary Property in the Romantic Period (Univ. of Pennsylvania P, 2007), Tilar Mazzeo was Assistant Professor at U Wisconsin, Oshkosh. She is now Professor at Colby College. With Marguerite Helmers she edited The Writing and Traveling Self, and she has written on wine, the history of luxury, and food. The Secret of Chanel No. 5: The Intimate History of the World’s Most Famous Perfume appeared in 2010.

A graduate student at Loyola U when funded for the project that became Romantic Women Writers, Revolution, and Prophecy: Rebellious Daughters, 1786-1826 (Cambridge UP 2013), Orianne Smith is now Associate Professor and Chair of the English Department at U Maryland, Baltimore County. She produced an edition of Mary Robinson’s Hubert de Sevrac (Pickering & Chatto, 2009) and a digital text of Betty Bennett’s British War Poetry in the Age of Romanticism 1793-1815, for Romantic Circles.

Cynthia Lawford, an independent scholar, edited Letitia Landon’s Romance and Reality, the second novel in Pickering & Chatto’s six-volume Silver Fork Novels, 1826-1841 (2005). She has written about Landon for Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net and The London Review of Books. Her funding was for “The Life and Work of Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802-38).”

Visiting Assistant Professor of Italian at U Pennsylvania when funded for “Wordsworth and the Undivine Dante, ” Joseph Luzzi is now Associate Professor of Italian and Director of the Italian Program at Bard College. Romantic Europe and the Ghost of Italy (Yale UP, 2008) won the MLA’s Scaglione Prize for Italian Studies. His articles on Italian Romanticism include “Romantic Allegory, Postwar Film, and the Question of Italy,” published in Modern Language Quarterly, 2007.

Ph.D. student at Boston U when he was funded for “The Subject of Theater: Theatrical Criticism and Literary Production in Britain, 1798-1832,” Jonathan Mulrooney is Associate Professor and Chair of the English Department, College of the Holy Cross, review editor for Studies in Romanticism, and the author of Romanticism and Theatrical Experience (Cambridge UP 2017). Other publications include “Reading Theatre, 1730-1830,” in The Cambridge Companion to Theatre, 1730-1830, “How Keats Falls” (Studies in Romanticism 2011), “Keats’s Avatar” (European Romantic Review 2011).

Sheila Spector, independent scholar in Brooklyn, New York, published Byron and the Jews (Wayne State UP, 2010), developed with her funding for “The Function of Jewish Stereotypes in British Romantic Literature.” She is the author of British Romanticism and The Jews (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2005), Romanticism/Judaica: A Convergence of Cultures (Ashgate, 2011), and editor of The Jews and British Romanticism: Politics, Religion, Culture, Romanticism (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2005); and an edition of Benjamin Disraeli’s Alroy for Romantic Circles. She also translated and edited Sketch of Christian Kabbalism by Francis Mercury van Helmont.

Ph.D. student at Princeton University when funded for “The Shelleys and the Science of Life,” Denise Gigante is now Professor of English at Stanford U. The Keats Brothers: The Life of John and George (Harvard UP 2011) follows Life: Organic Form and Romanticism (2009), Taste: A Literary History (2005), Gusto: Essential Writings in Literary Gastronomy (2005) and The Great Age of the English Essay: An Anthology(2008).

Research Associate at the Northrop Frye Center, at Victoria University in the University of Toronto, when he was funded for Leigh Hunt and the London Literary Scene (Routledge, 2005), Michael Sinatra is now Associate Professor at L’Université de Montréal. He is founding editor of the online Leigh Hunt Archive, and the editor (or coeditor) of Selected Writings of Leigh Hunt (6 volumes).