ABL Three-Month Research Fellowship awarded to Professor Dino Felluga

Three-Month Research Fellowship: Announcement of Award

Armstrong Browning Library, Baylor University

The Armstrong Browning Library (ABL: http://www.browninglibrary.org/) is a world-renowned research center and rare-collections library devoted to nineteenth-century studies located on the campus of Baylor University.  Recently, the ABL created a Three-Month Research Fellowship for leading scholars from outside Baylor (http://www.browninglibrary.org/index.php?id=930824).  The library received applications from outstanding scholars at institutions around the world.  After a rigorous and difficult review process, the ABL has selected Professor Dino Felluga (English, Purdue University) as the first recipient of this fellowship. Prof. Felluga will begin his residency in fall 2017.

Prof. Felluga is a leading scholar of nineteenth-century literature, with specializations in poetry, media studies, and critical theory.  He has pursued these interests through several books, such as The Perversity of Poetry (SUNY Press 2005) and Critical Theory: The Key Concepts (Routledge 2015), as well as ambitious editorial projects, such as the four-volume, one-million word Blackwell Encyclopedia of Victorian Literature (Wiley-Blackwell 2015), which contains articles by nearly 300 top scholars.  His articles have appeared in a wide range of venues, such as SEL: Studies in English Literature, Victorian Studies, Victorian Poetry, European Romantic Review, Modern Language Quarterly, English Language Notes, and Critical Quarterly.

Prof. Felluga has been instrumental in creating scholarly networks and digital-humanities initiatives that have become vital to nineteenth-century studies. He is a founding member of the North American Victorian Studies Association (NAVSA: http://navsa.org), of which he was the president for eleven years (2003-2014). He is also the founding general editor of BRANCH (Britain, Representation, and Nineteenth-Century History: http://branchcollective.org), a born-digital site that at present contains over half a million words of peer-reviewed material on all facets of nineteenth-century British history and culture by hundreds of scholars from around the globe.  From 2006-2014 he served as the founding Victorian editor of Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net (https://ravonjournal.org/).

His scholarship and expertise uniquely qualify Prof. Felluga for this fellowship at the Armstrong Browning Library (ABL).  The ABL has outstanding resources for the study of nineteenth-century literature (especially poetry) and culture and is committed to the digital humanities as a means of engaging scholars and the public with these resources.  During his three-month fellowship, Prof. Felluga will pursue several projects, chief among them The COVE: The Central Online Victorian Educator (see the still-in-development site: http://test-rc-distro.pantheonsite.io/).  This new online publication and teaching space for NAVSA will provide a digital and global editorial infrastructure for publishing peer-reviewed scholarly editions of Victorian texts that Victorianists find important for study but that commercial and university presses tend to regard as less profitable.  COVE editions will also be available for annotation in the classroom or for private use.  A suite of open-source tools will eventually be available through NAVSA to students and others that will enable them to create new editions and annotate texts, build subject-specific timelines, and design geo-spatial maps—each of which could be peer-reviewed for publication. While at the ABL, Prof. Felluga will develop crucial annotation software for COVE, as well as digital editions of poems by Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning in the ABL’s collection.  He will furthermore finish the first book in a two-volume work co-written with Emily Allen entitled Novel-Poetry, which investigates often-neglected but pervasive interactions between poetry and the novel in the Victorian period.  The first book, The Verse Novel and the Problem of Form, will contain chapters on the Brownings.  During his residency, Prof. Felluga will also engage faculty and students with his research and publish a digital-humanities article that lays out his work on the ABL digital editions.

Note on the Armstrong Browning Library (ABL) Collections: 

The ABL holds an unparalleled collection of manuscripts, letters, and rare items connected to the life and work of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Yet its holdings extend far beyond the Brownings, containing around fifty-thousand manuscripts, books, letters, periodicals, tracts, pamphlets, and other cultural artifacts related to nineteenth-century literature (especially poetry), music, visual culture, politics, religion, and science. Especially strong are holdings for figures such as Matthew Arnold, Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, Alfred Tennyson, Anna Brownell Jameson, George MacDonald, the Rossetti siblings, John Henry Newman, Francis William Newman, Charles Dickens, William Ewart Gladstone, and Queen Victoria—to name only a few. The ABL boasts one of the best collections of letters, journals, and rare printed materials by Joseph Milsand, the nineteenth-century French literary critic, philosopher, theologian, and friend of Robert Browning. Romanticists will find letters, rare books, first editions, and manuscripts linked to authors such as William Wordsworth, S.T. Coleridge, William Blake, Percy and Mary Shelley, Lord Byron, and Sir Walter Scott.  The ABL has amassed one of the world’s leading collections of volumes by nineteenth-century women poets, which includes a valuable representation of lesser-known poets alongside those, such as Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper, who have attracted sustained scholarly attention. These holdings are complemented by a large collection of lesser-known volumes of Victorian poetry. A noteworthy portion of the collections is devoted to manuscripts and rare items related to well-known American authors such as James Russell Lowell, Henry Longfellow, Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville, and Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.).  Those interested in religious history will find especially useful the ABL’s collection of thousands of nineteenth-century religious tracts and pamphlets.  These items and names represent only a fraction of the nineteenth-century subjects and figures, well-known and lesser-known, represented at the ABL.