June 13, 2012 — New College Professor of English Miriam Wallace has been granted a Visiting Fellowship at Yale University’s Lewis Walpole Library to conduct research this July on her project “Illustrating Speech: Depicting Professional, Popular, and Illicit Public Speaking, 1780-1820.” This year’s Visiting Fellows include scholars from Stanford, Columbia, New York University, University of Edinburgh and McGill University.
“I’m thrilled to be selected as a Walpole Fellow and looking forward to a whole month working in their tremendous archives,” Wallace said. “Even as so much has become widely available digitally, there’s still nothing like seeing the real thing in its original context to appreciate the complexity and richness of the late eighteenth-century explosion of popular print media.”
The award includes full access to the Walpole and other Yale University libraries along with a stipend, housing and travel expenses to and from Farmington, Conn., where the collection is housed. Wallace will spend four weeks researching in the library’s collection of serious and caricature images of public speeches — from speeches by famous attorneys and political/parliamentary speakers to caricatures of commoners speaking in pubs or rousing the populace with open-air speeches.
Dr. Wallace has been teaching at New College since 1995 with courses on the British novel and literary theory with particular interest in feminist and gender theories. She earned her master’s and doctoral degrees from University of California, Santa Cruz, and a bachelor’s degree from Swarthmore College. She is the author of Revolutionary Subjects in the English “Jacobin” Novel 1790-1805 and editor of Enlightening Romanticism, Romancing the Enlightenment: British Novels from 1750 to 1832. She is also co-editor of Re-Viewing Thomas Holcroft, 1745–1809, forthcoming this fall.
For more information, contact the Office of Public Affairs at 941-487-4153 or [email protected].
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