The Amy Lowell Letters Project Awarded NEH Grant
The Center for Textual Studies and Digital Humanities is thrilled to announce that the Amy Lowell Letters Project (directed by Dr. Melissa Bradshaw, English) has been awarded a $300,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities in the Scholarly Editions and Translations category. Over the next 36 months, this grant will support the creation an open-access, digital edition of the letters of American poet, editor, and critic Amy Lowell (1874–1925).
Supported by ÎçÒ¹AV’s Center for Textual Studies and Digital Humanities (CTSDH), this project edits and digitizes the correspondence of Amy Lowell and highlights her major contributions to modernist literature.
An influential (sometimes controversial) figure in American poetry, at the height of her career, Lowell was a literary star. She packed lecture halls, outsold her print runs, and wasn’t afraid to take bold stances—whether debating avant-garde poet Ezra Pound or championing the “New Poetry” movement for a broad public audience. Her anthologies introduced modernist poetry to thousands of new readers, and in 1926 (posthumously), she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for her poetry collection, What’s O’Clock.
Yet, for all her fame and influence, no comprehensive collection of her letters exists—despite the fact that she corresponded with just about every major literary figure of her time. Dr. Bradshaw has spent over twenty years researching and writing about Lowell. Her monograph, Amy Lowell, Diva Poet (Ashgate, 2011), won the 2011 Modern Language Association Book Prize for Independent Scholars. Her work on Lowell has also led to two co-edited collections published by Rutgers University Press: Selected Poems of Amy Lowell (2002), and Amy Lowell, American Modern (2004), the only book of critical essays on her work to date. Bradshaw was previously awarded an NEH-Mellon Fellowship in Digital Publication for work on ALLP in 2021, as well as a Visiting Fellowship at Houghton Library, Harvard University from 2023-2024.
Meet the Team
Dr. Bradshaw is joined by two Co-PIs and Co-Directors, both faculty at ÎçÒ¹AV. Dr. George Thiruvathukal (Computer Science) will guide the project’s digital infrastructure and Dr. Elizabeth Hopwood (English/Digital Humanities) will consult and train XML encoders on markup.
Danielle Nasenbeny (PhD Candidate, English) will continue her role as Project Manager and Technical Editor (as she defends her dissertation at the end of this month! 🎉).
The team is grateful for the contributions of Co-Editors Dr. Sarah Parker and Dr. Hannah Roche, UK-based scholars of modernist literature, as well as Contributing Editor Dr. Anne E. Fernald, professor at Fordham University.