Melissa Bradshaw

Title/s:  Senior Lecturer
Writing Program Director, Senior Lecturer

Office #:  Loyola Hall 202

Phone: 773.508.2796

Email: mbradshaw@luc.edu

External Webpage: melissabradshaw.org

About

My research focuses on the collective cultural memories that inform our understanding of powerful, public women. I argue that public discourse, at its most pervasive and superficial level, works to minimize their accomplishments and pathologize their ambitions. This theme informs much of my work, from my book monograph Amy Lowell, Diva Poet, to a Camera Obscura article on the arrogation of Janis Joplin’s life and career in the film The Rose, to a piece on FX’s Feud: Bette and Joan in the LA Review of Books. I primarily study this phenomenon in representations of American and British women poets, with recent articles focusing on iconic photographs of Edith Sitwell. My current book project, Collectible Women: Literary Celebrity and the Rhetorics of Remembering, traces narratives attached to American poets Edna St. Vincent Millay, Gertrude Stein, Sara Teasdale, Elinor Wylie, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Marianne Moore back to the images, ephemera, and archival materials that often stand in for their work in a culture more interested in poetic reputations than in poetry itself. I consider the ideological implications of physical materials such as author portraits, dust jackets, promotional materials, record sleeves, picture postcards, and tchotchkes, all of which help create and sustain public personas by producing poets as commercial entities. 

I am the PI and Project Director for  The Amy Lowell Letters Project, an open-access digital archive supported by an NEH-Mellon Foundation Fellowship for Digital Publication, and am also working on a print version of Lowell’s selected letters.

As Writing Program Director I am the point person for questions related to the Writing Program, including questions about the Writing Placement Exam, transfer equivalencies, writing courses, and teaching in the Writing Program. I regularly teach courses in pedagogical theory, writing studies, celebrity culture, and Chicago literature.

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