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 19th-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 United Kingdom.

Preference is given to projects involving subjects featured in The Keats-Shelley Journal, K-SAA’s annual publication. Projects need not be author-based, nor focus on Keats and the Shelleys. We especially encourage proposals for projects which expand traditional definitions of the field and its futures; particularly those engaging race, empire, gender, class, and/or global Romanticisms.

Awardees whose research plans include archival work at the British Library may be recommended for an additional top-off grant through the American Trust for the British Library Research Fellowship. Visit https://atbl.us for more information. 

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

Each grant is worth $3,000.

The deadline for 2027 awards is November 1, 2026.

Please read on to learn how to apply.

Eligibility

  • Advanced graduate students

  • Untenured faculty

  • Independent scholars working outside the academy

Purpose and Use of Funds

The grants are intended to fund research expenses related to scholarship in Romantic-era literature and culture. They do not support time off for writing, or for travel to conferences.

Application Procedures

To be considered, applications must include:

  • A completed application form

  • Curriculum vitae

  • A description of the project, no more than three pages long. This brief narrative should clearly describe your project, its contribution to the field, and your plan for use of the grant money.

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

  • Two letters of reference from people who know your work well and who can speak to how your project will contribute to the field as a whole. These letters should be sent directly by your referees to the Chair(s) of the Grants Committee at KSAA.Pforzheimer@gmail.com before the application deadline. The Chair for the 2027 year is Prof. Olivia Loksing Moy.

Please email your completed application as a single PDF to KSAA.Pforzheimer@gmail.com.

Follow-up: Year-End Report to the Association

Each December, K-SAA requests that grant recipients file project reports describing how the funds were used to support their research. It is always a pleasure to learn about different scholars’ methods, and the discoveries made at archives around the world! We thank you for your interest in K-SAA, and look forward to reading your application.


2026 Grant Recipients: Rebekah Cohen and Amy Wilcockson

Rebekah Cohen is a doctoral candidate at Newnham College, University of Cambridge. She is the recipient of one of our 2026 grants in support of her project Romantic Periodical Publishing and the Engendering of the Sketch, 1820s-1830s.

This project explores how Romantic writers conceptualized a specific genre of periodical writing— the prose sketch— through underexamined overlaps between Leigh Hunt and Mary Russell Mitford’s sketch-writing careers. The committee especially admired this project's attention to connections between the careers of Leigh Hunt and Mary Russell Mitford, and its focus on the sketch, a genre that has received comparatively little critical attention. The committee found compelling the project’s use of bibliographic methods to better understand sketch-writing in its successive stages of development, as well as its exploration of the gender dynamics inscribed in the serial publication of New Monthly Magazine. We expect Cohen's research to reveal new insights about the periodical networks of the 1820s and 1830s, and the important role of women in pioneering periodical writing."

The Pforzheimer Grant will allow Cohen to visit collections holding materials crucial to her project: the John Rylands Library at the University of Manchester for Mitford’s correspondence; the British Library and the National Art Library in London for materials related to the production of the New Monthly Magazine; the Pforzheimer and Berg Collections at the NYPL for Hunt and Mitford papers; and the Brewer-Leigh Hunt Collection at the University of Iowa for materials related to Hunt’s periodical work and sketch-writing. 

Amy Wilcockson is the MHRA Research Fellow, Queen Mary University of London. She is the recipient of one of our 2026 grants in support of her work in the comprehensive new edition of The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley to be published by Oxford University Press. Her project—“The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley: the Texas Holdings”—contributes to that edition.

By examining Shelley’s letters, some uncatalogued, at the Harry Ransom Center and at Texas Christian University, Wilcockson will ensure that the new edition includes previously unpublished letters, corrects mistakes in previous editions and presents updated annotations. The edition will include a census of Shelley’s letters, tracing their provenance as far as possible, on which Wilcockson will be the lead author. It will also publish a selection of letters to Shelley, and these will open up a fuller view of his relationships with his contemporaries.

The committee was impressed with the project’s high degree of organization and its clear scope, as well as with Wilcockson’s experience as an editor of Romantic-era correspondence. Her doctoral thesis was an edition of Thomas Campbell’s letters, and she has also edited correspondence in the Byron family papers at Newstead Abbey. An edition of letters is among the most old-fashioned of scholarly projects, but a reliable text is the first need of any scholar, and a new edition of Shelley’s letters has been on the desiderata list of Romanticists for many years. We are glad to be able to contribute to its completion. 


Past Grant Recipients