2024 K-SAA Pforzheimer Grant Winners
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.
The 2024 winners are Diana Little (Princeton University) and Paul Stephens (Oxford University)
Diana Little photo by Sameer Khan, courtesy of Princeton University Department of English website.
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.
The featured image for this post is by Adam Neikerk
