Carl H. Pforzheimer, Jr., Research Grants

The Pforzheimer Grants are awarded each year to support research in Romantic-era literature and culture. The awards honor Carl H. Pforzheimer, Jr. (1907-1996), past president, vigorous advocate, and most generous benefactor of our Association. An investment banker and philanthropist, he also served as head of The Carl and Lily Pforzheimer Foundation, established by his parents. The Foundation has long been distinguished for funding scholarship in early nineteenth-century English literature.

The Keats-Shelley Association awarded the first Pforzheimer Grants in 2000. Past winners have used the award to fund research travel to work with archives in Ghana, Jamaica, Spain, and the UK.

Preference is given to projects involving subjects featured in The Keats-Shelley Journal, the Association’s annual publication, including projects engaging race, empire, gender, class, and global Romanticisms. Advanced graduate students, untenured faculty, and independent scholars working outside the academy are eligible.

Each grant is worth $3,000.

The deadline for 2024 awards is November 1, 2023.


Eligibility:

Advanced graduate students, untenured faculty, and independent scholars working outside the academy.

Purpose:

To provide funding for research expenses related to scholarship in Romantic-era literature and culture. Projects need not be author-based nor focus on Keats or the Shelleys. K-SAA invites research that expands traditional definitions of the field and its futures, such as projects engaging race, empire, gender, class, and global Romanticisms approached through diverse methodological and theoretical frameworks. The grants do not support time off for writing or for travel to conferences.

Application Procedures

A complete application must include:

  • Application Form.

  • Curriculum vitae.

  • Description of the project, not to exceed three pages. This brief narrative should clearly describe your project, its contribution to the field, and your plan for use of the money.

  • A one-page bibliography of publications that treat the topic.

  • Two letters of reference from people who know your work well and can judge its value. These letters should be sent directly by your referees to the Chair of the Grants Committee before the application deadline.

Please email complete applications as a single PDF file to the Chair of the Grants Committee, Professor Olivia Loksing Moy at: KSAA.Pforzheimer@gmail.com

Report to the Association:

The Keats-Shelley Association expects awardees to file project reports by the following December describing how the grants furthered their research.

Past Grant Recipients

2023

Francesca Mackenney

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

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.

2022

Valentina Aparacio

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

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.