Document
Melissa Bradshaw
Election
Position
Name
Melissa Bradshaw
Candidate statement
Senior Lecturer, English, Loyola University Chicago
MSA has been my primary conference for over two decades, a source of professional and intellectual support, inspiration, and friendship. As second vice president I would bring to the association a career-long commitment to a robust, interdisciplinary understanding of modernism. I would also bring the perspective of a contingent faculty member who has sustained a vigorous
research program without formal institutional support. MSA has played an important role in my flourishing on the margins of the academy, keeping me grounded in an intellectual community of peers and mentors. Importantly, it has changed the way I approach my scholarship, pushing me to explore new modalities for my research through workshops and a tuition scholarship to a week-long Digital Humanities Summer Institute. I credit my current project, an NEH-Mellon funded digital critical edition of Amy Lowell’s letters almost entirely to the association. I have been heartened to see MSA’s efforts to diversify its membership, including concerted efforts to reach out both to scholars struggling with precarity, and to scholars whose careers have not followed traditional academic paths. I look forward to developing programming and workshops that help a broader group of early 20th century scholars see MSA as an intellectual home. As a resourceful administrator and a careful shepherd of resources, I would be a valuable board member during this critical moment for MSA, as we work to stay afloat in a challenging post pandemic financial situation and elevant in a shifting academic landscape.
Website and Sample publications:
melissabradshaw.org
“Miss Lowell Regrets,” Modernism/modernity Print Plus (October 12, 2022),
https://modernismmodernity.org/forums/posts/bradshaw-miss-lowell-regrets
Amy Lowell: Diva Poet. Ashgate Press, December 2011. Winner of the MLA Book Prize for
Independent Scholars, 2011.
“Fantasies of Belonging, Fears of Precarity.” Women Making Modernism. Ed. Erica Delsandro.
University Press of Florida, 2020, 157-173.
“The Apotheosis of Edith”: Artifice and Noblesse Oblige in Cecil Beaton’s Portraits of the
Sitwell Siblings.” The Many Facades of Edith Sitwell. Ed. Allan Pero and Gyllian Phillips.
University Press of Florida, 2017, 54-74
MSA has been my primary conference for over two decades, a source of professional and intellectual support, inspiration, and friendship. As second vice president I would bring to the association a career-long commitment to a robust, interdisciplinary understanding of modernism. I would also bring the perspective of a contingent faculty member who has sustained a vigorous
research program without formal institutional support. MSA has played an important role in my flourishing on the margins of the academy, keeping me grounded in an intellectual community of peers and mentors. Importantly, it has changed the way I approach my scholarship, pushing me to explore new modalities for my research through workshops and a tuition scholarship to a week-long Digital Humanities Summer Institute. I credit my current project, an NEH-Mellon funded digital critical edition of Amy Lowell’s letters almost entirely to the association. I have been heartened to see MSA’s efforts to diversify its membership, including concerted efforts to reach out both to scholars struggling with precarity, and to scholars whose careers have not followed traditional academic paths. I look forward to developing programming and workshops that help a broader group of early 20th century scholars see MSA as an intellectual home. As a resourceful administrator and a careful shepherd of resources, I would be a valuable board member during this critical moment for MSA, as we work to stay afloat in a challenging post pandemic financial situation and elevant in a shifting academic landscape.
Website and Sample publications:
melissabradshaw.org
“Miss Lowell Regrets,” Modernism/modernity Print Plus (October 12, 2022),
https://modernismmodernity.org/forums/posts/bradshaw-miss-lowell-regrets
Amy Lowell: Diva Poet. Ashgate Press, December 2011. Winner of the MLA Book Prize for
Independent Scholars, 2011.
“Fantasies of Belonging, Fears of Precarity.” Women Making Modernism. Ed. Erica Delsandro.
University Press of Florida, 2020, 157-173.
“The Apotheosis of Edith”: Artifice and Noblesse Oblige in Cecil Beaton’s Portraits of the
Sitwell Siblings.” The Many Facades of Edith Sitwell. Ed. Allan Pero and Gyllian Phillips.
University Press of Florida, 2017, 54-74
Candidate CV