Bradshaw NEH Grant
Bradshaw Receives Prestigious NEH Grant
Grant Supports The Amy Lowell Letters Project
Melissa Bradshaw, PhD, Senior Lecturer and Writing Program Director in the College of Arts and Sciences’ Department of English, has received a $300,000 National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) grant to support work on The Amy Lowell Letters Project (ALLP), an open-access digital scholarly edition of the never-before-collected letters of American poet, editor, and critic Amy Lowell (1874–1925).
Supported by Loyola University Chicago’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.
“Congratulations to Dr. Bradshaw and her colleagues for securing this highly competitive and prestigious grant,” said Peter J. Schraeder, Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. “This project is simultaneously innovative, collaborative, and interdisciplinary, while underscoring our faculty’s leadership in the digital humanities field.”
An influential, and sometimes controversial, figure in American poetry, Lowell was a literary star who 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.
For all Lowell's fame and influence, no comprehensive collection of her letters exists—even though she corresponded with just about every major literary figure of her time, from popular poets like Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, and William Carlos Williams to publishing powerhouses like Alfred Knopf and George Macmillan.
“Amy Lowell was a major literary figure whose significant body of work merits attention in its own right, but her erasure has also been bad for literary history writ large, because her letters are a gold mine of information about modern poetry,” said Bradshaw. “It is no exaggeration to describe her as the center of a complex network of literary professionals working at the cutting edge of modernist experimentation."
Bradshaw has spent over 20 years researching and writing about Lowell. Her monograph, Amy Lowell, Diva Poet (Ashgate, 2011, Routledge, 2024), 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.
Bradshaw is joined by two Co-PIs and Co-Directors, both faculty members in the College of Arts and Sciences at Loyola. 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.
Dr. Danielle Nasenbeny, a recent graduate of Loyola's graduate program in English will continue her role as Project Manager and Technical Editor. The team will also be joined by 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.
The Scholarly Editions and Translations grant from the NEH is for 36 months and was part of the organization’s recent announcement to support 97 projects in the humanities across the country.
About the College of Arts and Sciences
Founded in 1870, the College of Arts and Sciences is the oldest and largest of Loyola University Chicago’s 13 schools and colleges, serving as the academic home for nearly 8,000 students (roughly 50 percent of Loyola’s total student population). It is academically diverse with twenty academic departments that span an array of intellectual pursuits, ranging from the natural sciences and computational sciences to the humanities, the social sciences, and the fine and performing arts. It is also highly interdisciplinary with thirty-one interdisciplinary programs and seven interdisciplinary centers, including the mission-centric Jesuit Heritage Research Center and the Hank Center for the Catholic Intellectual Heritage. The College is home to over 450 full-time, award-winning faculty, who are committed to teaching and research excellence. They teach nearly 2,000 classes each semester, including 88 percent of all Core Curriculum classes taken by undergraduate students across the university. They also contribute to eleven doctoral programs whose graduates have helped propel Loyola starting in 2025 to R-1 research status (the highest research status a university can achieve). Our students and faculty are engaged internationally at our John Felice Rome Center in Italy, as well as at dozens of university-sponsored study abroad and research sites around the world. Home to the departments that anchor the university’s Core Curriculum, the College seeks to prepare all of Loyola’s students to think critically, to engage the world of the 21st century at ever-deepening levels, and to become caring and compassionate individuals. Our faculty, staff, and students view service to others not just as one option among many, but as a constitutive dimension of their very being. In the truest sense of the Jesuit ideal, our graduates strive to be “individuals for others.”
Melissa Bradshaw, PhD, Senior Lecturer and Writing Program Director in the College of Arts and Sciences’ Department of English, has received a $300,000 National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) grant to support work on The Amy Lowell Letters Project (ALLP), an open-access digital scholarly edition of the never-before-collected letters of American poet, editor, and critic Amy Lowell (1874–1925).
Supported by Loyola University Chicago’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.
“Congratulations to Dr. Bradshaw and her colleagues for securing this highly competitive and prestigious grant,” said Peter J. Schraeder, Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. “This project is simultaneously innovative, collaborative, and interdisciplinary, while underscoring our faculty’s leadership in the digital humanities field.”
An influential, and sometimes controversial, figure in American poetry, Lowell was a literary star who 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.
For all Lowell's fame and influence, no comprehensive collection of her letters exists—even though she corresponded with just about every major literary figure of her time, from popular poets like Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, and William Carlos Williams to publishing powerhouses like Alfred Knopf and George Macmillan.
“Amy Lowell was a major literary figure whose significant body of work merits attention in its own right, but her erasure has also been bad for literary history writ large, because her letters are a gold mine of information about modern poetry,” said Bradshaw. “It is no exaggeration to describe her as the center of a complex network of literary professionals working at the cutting edge of modernist experimentation."
Bradshaw has spent over 20 years researching and writing about Lowell. Her monograph, Amy Lowell, Diva Poet (Ashgate, 2011, Routledge, 2024), 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.
Bradshaw is joined by two Co-PIs and Co-Directors, both faculty members in the College of Arts and Sciences at Loyola. 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.
Dr. Danielle Nasenbeny, a recent graduate of Loyola's graduate program in English will continue her role as Project Manager and Technical Editor. The team will also be joined by 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.
The Scholarly Editions and Translations grant from the NEH is for 36 months and was part of the organization’s recent announcement to support 97 projects in the humanities across the country.
About the College of Arts and Sciences
Founded in 1870, the College of Arts and Sciences is the oldest and largest of Loyola University Chicago’s 13 schools and colleges, serving as the academic home for nearly 8,000 students (roughly 50 percent of Loyola’s total student population). It is academically diverse with twenty academic departments that span an array of intellectual pursuits, ranging from the natural sciences and computational sciences to the humanities, the social sciences, and the fine and performing arts. It is also highly interdisciplinary with thirty-one interdisciplinary programs and seven interdisciplinary centers, including the mission-centric Jesuit Heritage Research Center and the Hank Center for the Catholic Intellectual Heritage. The College is home to over 450 full-time, award-winning faculty, who are committed to teaching and research excellence. They teach nearly 2,000 classes each semester, including 88 percent of all Core Curriculum classes taken by undergraduate students across the university. They also contribute to eleven doctoral programs whose graduates have helped propel Loyola starting in 2025 to R-1 research status (the highest research status a university can achieve). Our students and faculty are engaged internationally at our John Felice Rome Center in Italy, as well as at dozens of university-sponsored study abroad and research sites around the world. Home to the departments that anchor the university’s Core Curriculum, the College seeks to prepare all of Loyola’s students to think critically, to engage the world of the 21st century at ever-deepening levels, and to become caring and compassionate individuals. Our faculty, staff, and students view service to others not just as one option among many, but as a constitutive dimension of their very being. In the truest sense of the Jesuit ideal, our graduates strive to be “individuals for others.”