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Meyer H. Abrams Senior Fellowship

Celebrating one of the National Humanities Center’s founders as well as one of the nation’s leading literary scholars, the Meyer H. Abrams fellowship has been awarded annually to a scholar working in literary studies since 2006. One of the twentieth century’s leading figures in literary criticism, Abrams is most well known for The Mirror and the Lamp (1953), considered one of the finest critical works produced during the twentieth century, and the Norton Anthology of English Literature for which Abrams was the founding editor.

The Abrams fellowship was endowed by financier Stephen Weiss, a trustee emeritus of the National Humanities Center and a distinguished alumnus of Cornell University, where he studied with Abrams. A committed philanthropist, Weiss served for many years as a trustee of Cornell and made many gifts to the university including fellowships for undergraduates, professorships in the humanities and medicine, a deanship, and faculty research grants.

2007–2008	Elizabeth Helsinger	University of Chicago	A Peculiar Music: Poetry, Art, and Song in Nineteenth-Century Britain
2008–2009	Deborah Nord	Princeton University	Leaving Home: Women Writers and the Public Sphere, 1800 to the Present
2009–2010	Joseph Boone	University of Southern California	The Homoerotics of Orientalism: Mappings of Male Desire in Narratives of the Near and Middle East
2010–2011	Henry S. Turner	Rutgers University	The Corporate Commonwealth: Economy, Technology and Political Community
2011–2012	Jonathan D. Culler	Cornell University	The Theory of the Lyric
2012–2013	Sarah T. Beckwith	Duke University	Shakespeare and the Names of Action
2013–2014	Lynn Festa	Rutgers University	All Things Human in Eighteenth-Century Britain
2014–2015	Lena Cowen Orlin	Georgetown University	The Private Life of William Shakespeare
2015–2016	Jane O. Newman	University of California, Irvine	Auerbach’s Worlds: Early / Modern Mimesis between Religion and History
2016–2017	Derek Attridge	University of York, U.K.	Poetry in Performance from Homer to the Renaissance
2017–2018	Blake Wilson	Dickinson College	Dominion of the Ear: Memory, Performance, and Oral Poetry in Early Modern Italy
2017–2018	Maud Ellmann	University of Chicago	Inside Out: Psychoanalysis and Fiction in World War II Britain and France
2018–2019	Ted Underwood	University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign	A Perspectival History of Fiction in English, 1800–2008
2019–2020	Marsha Gordon	North Carolina State University	Leftover Ladies: Ursula Parrott and the Emergence of the Modern Woman
2020–2021	Aarthi Vadde	Duke University	We the Platform: Contemporary Literature after Web 2.0
2021–2022	Juan G. Ramos	College of the Holy Cross	Andean Modernismos: Affective Forms in Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru
2022–2023	Cedric R. Tolliver	University of Oklahoma	Spook(ed): African American Literature, National Security, and the Fictions of Statecraft
2023–2024	Jonathan Sachs	Concordia University	Slow Time
2024–2025	Frank Shovlin	University of Liverpool	John McGahern: A Writing Life