Carl H. Pforzheimer, Jr., Research Grants - 2019 winners announced
The Pforzheimer Grants are awarded each year to support research in British Romanticism and literary culture, 1789-1832.
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.
Find out more about how to apply for the 2020 awards here.
2019 winners
Kacie Wills, who received her degree there last September, is currently working as an Instructional Specialist at Lane Community College. The grant will fund her travel to London for archival research at the British Library and the British Museum, which will provide the foundation for her later use of digital tools to provide wider access to the scrapbook on hot-air balloons assembled by Sarah Sophia Banks, sister of the famed botanist Joseph Banks. This online resource will uncover and establish connections to the Romantic fascination with the balloon and illustrate a way of thinking about materiality, significance, science and spectacle, displayed in the popular culture of the period and in the writings of Percy and Mary Shelley, among others. The balloon scrapbook will form just one segment of a larger digital archive, already in embryo, currently titled “Exploring the Collections of Sarah Sophia Banks.”
Padma Rangarajan, who formerly taught at the University of Colorado, Boulder, became an Assistant Professor at UC Riverside this past July. She is currently working on a monograph bearing the title Thug Life: The British Empire and the Birth of Terrorism, which posits that the discourse over what constitutes illegitimate political violence can only be properly understood by acknowledging the nation state’s historical correlative, modern imperialism. The Grant will underwrite her research trip to Dublin and London. For a chapter which considers representations of the 1798 Irish Rebellion and resistance networks between Ireland and India, she will explore the Rebellion Papers Collection at the National Archives of Ireland; for another chapter, in which she will tease out the implications of Burke’s “Indianism and Jacobinism,” with a special focus on “Tiger” Tipu Sultan, ruler of Mysore, she will explore the extensive papers and cultural ephemera at the British Library connected with this figure.