Award recognizes Professor Feldman’s groundbreaking contributions to the study of British Romanticism.
Paula R. Feldman has received the Russell Award for Research in Humanities and Social Science, the university’s most prestigious scholarly award in her field. It is given annually “for innovative research or creative achievement” in publications over the course of one’s career.
Professor Feldman, as one of her nominators attests, “has, by virtue of her large and growing body of high quality editorial and critical work, been largely responsible for creating a new field of study within English literature,” bringing much-needed critical attention to Romantic-era women’s writing, from her 2-volume, groundbreaking edition of The Journals of Mary Shelley, published by Oxford University Press in 1987 to her scholarly editions of poetry by Felicia Hemans (1999) and Helen Maria Williams (2014). In order to produce these outstanding works, Feldman performed extensive archival research at libraries around the world, covering genres from sonnets to epics and artifacts from manuscript diaries to literary annuals. British Women Poets of the Romantic Era, published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 1997, brought a whole new body of literary work to the attention of scholars. Her co-edited volume, A Century of Sonnets: The Romantic-Era Revival, was published in 1999 by Oxford University Press. In 2007, she was honored by the Keats-Shelley Association of America with their highest honor, the Distinguished Scholar Award. Additionally, she has published essays in literary history, ecocriticism, history of the book, and women’s writing, and co-authored books on digital humanities pedagogy.
Feldman’s most recent volume is a substantial new co-edited, 640-page edition, The Collected Poetry of Mary Tighe, published in 2016 by Johns Hopkins University Press. As Will Bowers writes in The Times Literary Supplement, this is “an important book: its introduction provides a compelling and thorough biography, and the text itself is the most complete corpus of an unduly marginalized poet.” He concludes that it permits “Tighe to be appreciated in all [her] complexity” and helps “add nuance to a rigid view of Romantic poetry in the British Isles.”