Dr. Melissa Bradshaw: What We Lose When We Erase Women from History

Dr. Melissa Bradshaw

This month brought me to the office of Dr. Melissa Bradshaw, a longstanding Loyola Senior Lecturer and Director of the Writing Program. Her research focuses on collective cultural memories that inform the public's understanding of powerful, public women. She argues that public discourse, at its superficial level minimizes women's accomplishments and downplays their ambitions. Recently, Dr. Bradshaw made Loyola headlines for securing a $300,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities in the Scholarly Editions and Translations category to support her continued leadership work on the Amy Lowell Letters Project. 

"I'm from Southern, California, and I went to college in Utah and then Graduate School in New York at Stony Brook University. So I kind of did the whole country. I'm a modernist; I studied 20th century British and American Literature, but I accidentally did a lot of work in British Victorian literature, so that was my secondary area during my dissertation."
Where did this drive for Victorian novels come from? "Well, it was what they were teaching! But, I loved it so much! I'd spent my whole life thinking that I didn't like Victorian novels and it turns out, I was wrong. Why in the world would I not like Victorian novels?"
"Currently, I do work on modern American poetry and women poets, and Amy Lowell has been the primary focus of my research. However throughout my entire career I've been involved with doing what's called feminist reclamation work; it is work that takes a woman author who's fallen off the map for whatever reason and investigating who they were. My dissertation was about Amy Lowell and I won the MLA Book prize for my first book Amy Lowell Diva Poet, which was not so much about her poetry, but about what it takes to forget somebody who was important. At the time of her death, she was easily one of the most important poets in America. She spoke to crowds of 300, lectured all over the country, she was peers with Robert Frost and William Carlos Williams, and then more modernist poets like Ezra Pound. Her energy was towards making modern poetics accessible to a larger audience and she did that by working with major publishers. She worked with Houghton Mifflin for example to get a three-year anthology of images poetry published. This meant it was printed on a larger scale, was cheaper to buy, and could be distributed around the country. Her feeling was that modern poetry is gonna help people who think that they don't like poetry or don't know how to read poetry. She felt it was going show them that it is actually completely accessible. She lectured around the country and she wrote lectures as well and printed newspaper columns and she worked really hard to make the poetry accessible and then she told people how to read it. This made her a literary celebrity."

So how does a famous poet at the top of her game become virtually erased from history? "She was pretty villainized in high modernist circles, they saw her as a joke because she was a woman, because she's a Lowell of Lowell, Massachusetts, so she was from one of the oldest families in Colonial America. In my book I also talk about the fact that she was a single, fat woman; she was like five feet tall, 250 pounds, so she was the butt of jokes by the high modernism crowd. When she died, early and at the age of 51 in 1925, the high modernists--and I'm mostly talking about Ezra Pound--who were the generation that first archived poets libraries at the Library of Congress, they wrote the first anthologies and she was shut out. Literary history moved on and we had this huge place where this life was just missing. So I wrote my first book on what it took to forget somebody that important; a book about forgetting."

Outside of penning a work that tells Amy Lowell's story Dr. Bradshaw is the current Director of the Amy Lowell's Letters Project (of which we was awarded $300,000 to keep this project moving forward.) "One of the best Resources we have for understanding Amy Lowell is her letters. Because she was wealthy she kept secretaries and she had all her letters written on carbon, so she saved carbon copies of everything that she sent out; she also saved everything that got sent to her. So even during the decades when people weren't studying Amy Lowell, they were going to Harvard's Houghton Library to access her letters because she wrote to everybody who was anybody. The whole history of Modern American poetry is essentially in those letters! But nobody had ever done a collected letters of hers, which is crazy, because way more minor figures have had their letters collected."
"I originally was doing an edition of her letters and I kept applying for NEH grants to support a research leave to edit a collection of her letters and The NEH said this would be a more compelling project if it was digital. So, I taught myself, and created a digital project. Dr. Elizabeth Hopwood (of Digital Humanities) invited me to teach the Digital Humanities 500 where I got to work with graduate students who helped me flesh out what would it actually take to digitize these letters. We also are turning the letters into a searchable dataset, because right now all of her outgoing correspondence, you can actually see it on Harvard's website they've scanned it, and what my project is doing is, I've selected 60 of the names that I think we can't live without, and I have graduate students who transcribe them, and I add annotations to help tell who's in the letters, then another set of graduate students create tags. Our next step is to put it online and ultimately allow users to go to those digitized letters and enter search terms. So maybe you don't ever want to hear about Amy Lowell, but you're super interested in Macmillan Publishing Company, you type 'Macmillan' and you're gonna get at least 200 letters to just one of her editors. Once we've got a critical mass of letters tagged and sitting on a site, then we can start to run some quantitative analyses and see how many of her letters have to do with World War One and then narrow it down to World War One and libraries for soldiers, so we can start to extract information."

Above all this, Dr. Bradshaw is also the Director of the Writing Program. "Being the Writing Program Director is one of the best parts of my life. When you teach first-year writing or when you teach as intensely as people do in the Writing Program you learn how to problem solve and support your students as they're grappling with what it means to be a college student and that's rewarding. I'm very honored to be in a position now where my energy is towards supporting the faculty members that I supervise as they provide that support. I think get to work with I would say are the best people in the English Department. They are so committed to pedagogical innovation and student care and problem-solving. I can't believe I get to work with them!"

Though Dr. Bradshaw is a Literary Historian she still understands the power of popular culture and its role in the classroom. "My main goal for my students is for them to give themselves permission to be in the space of the classroom and open to information. I love to help my students see literature contextualized, and popular culture contextualized. I teach a diva class. It's one of the classes I teach the most and  some of it is getting my students to recognize patterns of how we think about public women and being able to apply those to in other situations. So we look at divas in books and in entertainment, but another part of me is just secretly just trying to make them fans of people Celia Cruz and Maria Callas and Marian Anderson and Lena Horne. Actually, we just did a Lena Horne day yesterday and it's such a privilege to be able to--ok first of all, you can't just teach Lena Horne I have a critical article that talks about Lena Horne as somebody who "unperforms" in a world that expects black women to be a certain way. She refuses it. So I have a really challenging theoretical readings about her. But then I just get to show the clips of her and and let the students apply the things that they've already learned."
"In my poetry classes and in my UCLR I really like to emphasize the container of a text. So for example, I don't like to extract poems, I like them to get the whole book of poetry. Okay, so if they're gonna read Carl Sandburg's poem Chicago I want them to have in their hands the Book of Chicago Poetry. We just spent five weeks on Gwendolyn Brooks and I made them get the big anthology of her work, which has every single book she ever published. I want students to be able to understand what's the difference between a street in Bronzeville and The Mecca, and how do books at different parts of her career look, what do they represent as a whole? "
"For example, if you're looking at someone's collected work of poems, somebody has made a decision to put them in this order. Somebody's made decisions about the font, the paperweight, the spacing, all of this is important in how the work is viewed and taken in. This is something I learned from Amy Wolfe. She worked with a designer named Berkeley Updyke for all of her books and it was very specific; she was very specific on how poems were laid out on a page that she didn't ever want another poem to start on the same page. She wanted a certain amount of white space around it. she wanted the paper to be a certain stock. In textual studies, we call that the bibliographic code. So there's the text but then there's a bibliographic codes that surround and contain the text I really want my students to get that idea."

In a society steeped in AI and online meetings and screen focused work, Dr. Bradshaw has one critical rule for her classes. "I have zero tolerance for not showing up to class. Really the most important thing you have to do is be in the classroom to be present. Also, this semester I've tried not having a lot of screens so I can work on my students just being there. I'm very satisfied when they start to get to be friends with each other and start to trust each other"

When it comes to books, what does someone read when she is not in the trenches with Amy Lowell or buoying her students through the power of the diva? "Well, I'm not very good at letting myself read. Actually, I'm terrible at reading because I get tired and also because I always feel like the last thing I do before I fall asleep should be something that pushes me into my next day. So I usually am reading something for teaching or something about my research project. But my daughter was just in India for two weeks touring with her choir and at the same time my partner was teaching Jhumpa Lahiri's, The Interpreter of Maladies in the honors program, so I picked that up and I just devoured it. I usually let myself read a big book during Christmas. Cloud Cuckoo Land was probably the last big one. I'm really good at getting books and I'm very bad at reading it I'm super good at starting and then falling asleep."

"I think I need people to understand that, ok maybe you don't like Amy Lowell's poems, but show me one other person who is in daily contact with Houghton Mifflin, Macmillan, The Saturday Evening Post, the Atlantic Monthly, you know all these little presses. Her presence just wasn't in the poetry, it was in communication, in letters, everywhere, and my ultimate lesson that I try to impart to people is if you drop any one figure in history because you're dismissive of their accomplishment, then look at what you've just lost. You've lost so much."