A scholar from Florida State University’s Department of English has been recognized for her influence in the field of Romantic-era writing and culture.

Judith Pascoe, George Mills Harper Professor of English, earned the 2025 Distinguished Scholar Award from the Keats-Shelley Association of America (K-SAA) in recognition of her careerlong excellence in scholarship on Romantic-era British literature and culture. As one of this year’s two awardees, Pascoe was honored by K-SAA in January during the 2025 Modern Language Association Annual Convention in New Orleans.

“I was surprised and pleased to earn the award, especially since previous recipients include my dissertation director at the University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Stuart Curran, who was a major champion of Romantic-era women writers,” Pascoe said.

Established in 1949, K-SAA enhances the study and appreciation of John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley, prominent writers during the Romantic era, which ran from the late-18th century to the early-19th century. K-SAA’s Distinguished Scholar Award honors those who have dedicated their careers to studying Romantic-era writers and culture.

“It’s very exciting for one of the department’s own to receive such a coveted distinction from an important organization in the field,” said Andrew Epstein, chair of the Department of English and Caldwell Professor of English. “It confirms Dr. Pascoe’s reputation as one of the most important and influential scholars of Romanticism.”

“The British Romantics wrote some of the most remarkable poetry and prose in literary history and their influence lives on in genres ranging from horror movies to political manifestos,” Pascoe said. “What’s more, the societal issues with which the Romantics grappled — such as racism, technologies, climate events and political revolutions — still challenge us today.”

Last year, Pascoe earned a $60,000 grant from the National Endowment of Humanities to complete her book, “Twinkle, Twinkle: Female Literary Ambition, Male Genius, and the Most Famous Poet You’ve Never Heard Of.” The project spotlights Jane Taylor, the author of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” and will be Pascoe’s fifth book related to British Romanticism. To complete this project, Pascoe will also draw on Strozier Library’s John MacKay Shaw Collection of Childhood in Poetry and research support provided by the George Mills Harper Professorship.

“I strive to make my research engaging and accessible to a broad audience,” Pascoe said. “In my most recent book, ‘On the Bullet Train with Emily Brontë’, which I completed as a Guggenheim Fellow, I sought to understand why ‘Wuthering Heights’ has been so warmly embraced in Japan, and also to chronicle my experience as an adult student of Japanese.”

In “The Hummingbird Cabinet: A Rare and Curious History of Romantic Collectors” (Cornell University Press, 2005), Pascoe drew on archival research to explore collecting’s role in the relationship between reader, author and authorial legacy. She wrote about collectors of birds, books, Napoleonic relics, botanical specimens, Egyptiana and fossils.

In “The Sarah Siddons Audio Files: Romanticism and the Lost Voice” (University of Michigan Press, 2011), Pascoe sought to recreate the lost voice of Sarah Siddons, a Romantic-era theater actress whose powerful performances, including as Lady Macbeth, caused audience members to faint during the time before voices could be recorded. In pursuit of this goal, Pascoe enrolled in a Voice for Actors class, collected Lady Macbeth performance recordings and started listening more carefully to the soundscape of her own life. Pascoe’s book also investigated how modern recording technology has altered the human experience of the voice.

“Recipients of the Distinguished Scholar Award like Dr. Pascoe are recognized for helping to set the agenda for the future study of Romanticism, underscoring something we’re very proud of: FSU is on the cutting edge of research in this important literary field and the humanities more broadly,” Epstein said.

To learn more about Pascoe’s work and FSU’s Department of English, visit english.fsu.edu.

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Two faculty members from the Florida State University Department of English have received funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities that will aid in their research this summer.

Associate professors Lindsey Eckert and Tarez Samra Graban were each awarded a $6,000 NEH summer stipend grant that will support their full-time work on humanities projects for two months. Eckert and Graban were among 97 researchers selected from across the country to receive a summer stipend, and the funds are part of $26.2 million in grants for 238 humanities projects NEH released in April.

The awards were a surprise for FSU since the NEH selected both proposals submitted by the FSU Office of Research. While institutions can submit two proposals, rarely, if ever, has the NEH awarded more than one summer stipend to researchers from a single institution and department.

“I don’t think we knew that each of us had applied until our applications were selected on behalf of FSU,” said Graban, a Rhetoric and Composition program faculty member. “That was my first moment of thinking, ‘Wow, two of us from a single department. This is amazing.’”

Graban’s NEH award will allow her to travel to Ghana and South Africa to complete archival research for her next book, titled “Rhetorika Afrika: Finding and Losing Feminist Discourses in the Transnational Archive.” The time Graban spends at the University of Accra in Ghana and at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, will mark her fourth visit to the continent since 2014 for research.

“The book is arguing for the ways in which archival memory and power interact to shape feminist legacies in certain parts of Africa,” Graban said. “I’m interrogating how the transnational consumption of archival documents reinforces certain beliefs about how African women can either lead or not lead on the global stage. More African countries have elected women to particular leadership roles than any other region of the world.”

However, as Graban explains, their legacies are not well documented, and in many instances, the elected women do not have archival or administrative control over their own legacies.

“If their country or region does not have a stable archive or library, those materials are often co-opted by wealthier institutions with neoliberal agendas,” she added. “As their materials become subsumed under other national narratives, it becomes more difficult to conceive of what it means or could mean to be a ‘feminist’ leader in Africa.”

Eckert, a Literature, Media, and Culture program faculty member, will conduct research at the University of Reading, just outside London, for her project, “Romanticism Bound: British Bookbinding and the Forms of Literature.” Her two months of research will focus on the Longman Group Archive. Thomas Longman was a bookseller who founded Longman Publishing, now known as Pearson Longman, in 1724.

Eckert will collect unpublished archival information about the Longman firm’s business records and their correspondence with authors and business partners. The materials will support a chapter in her forthcoming book exploring the history of 18th- and 19th-century commercial bookbinding and its influence on literary culture.

“We are used to going into a bookstore and seeing books with their covers popping out at us from display tables,” Eckert said. “While we are told not to judge a book by its cover, that is how we buy many of our books.”

Before the widespread use of bookbinding, buyers bought the printed text with no binding. They could send those pages to a binder to have them bound to individual specifications, meaning one person’s copy of a novel might look different from another owner’s copy.

“Around the turn of the 19th century, publishers started to sell books to readers already bound,” Eckert explained. “That is a really exciting moment in the history of literature, when people’s copies of the same book start to look the same, and you start to see the book as a unified object being presented to readers.”

Given the intense competition to have just one project funded by the NEH program, receiving two grants, and both of those grants from within a single department, speaks to the extraordinary work being done in the department, according to Andrew Epstein, professor of English and the department’s chair.

“This well-deserved national honor and recognition only further confirms that Dr. Graban and Dr. Eckert are doing important, cutting-edge research and that their excellent scholarly contributions are helping define the future of their fields,” Epstein said.

For more information on Eckert’s and Graban’s work and about the FSU Department of English, visit english.fsu.edu.

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A Florida State University researcher has received National Endowment of Humanities funding to explore the connections forged between music, race and slavery in the 18th century and how those connections resonate in the present day.

Maria Ryan, an assistant professor of musicology at the FSU College of Music, secured a $30,000 NEH fellowship to work on “Ambivalent Listening: Race, Music, and Slavery in the British Colonial Caribbean, 1750–1838.”

“Receiving an NEH fellowship is invaluable in allowing me to dedicate time to complete my book,” Ryan said. “Through this research, I have collected a huge amount of data about music, musicians, and listening in the British colonial Caribbean, and the NEH fellowship provides an incredible opportunity for dedicated time to revisit these thousands of records, weaving them into the story I tell in the book about the changing ways that people in scenes of slavery engaged with European music in the decades leading up to emancipation.”

“Ambivalent Listening” incorporates materials from a dozen archives across five countries to examine how African and African-descended people engaged with European music to assert their intellectual and aesthetic capabilities while simultaneously learning, adapting, and sometimes subverting the music of those who subjugated them.

“Although I was born in London into a family descended from Jamaican and Irish immigrants, from childhood, I chose to pursue training as a musician in the classical European tradition,” she said. “However, as I continued my musical higher education, I began to question the gap I had perceived between my family heritage and the music that I performed and researched.”

These questions led Ryan to her current book project in which she examines the lives of musicians who played their master’s tunes, “arguing that ideas about the relationship between music and race were in flux during slavery.”

“Dr. Ryan’s important investigation into how music both impacts and reflects the lives of people in a social and historical context is vital to understanding the past and also the present,” said Gregory Jones, associate dean for outreach and engagement in the College of Music. “She is an important part of our distinguished musicology program that unites faculty and students in innovative research and creative musical presentations.”

Ryan praised colleagues in the musicology area who are a “constant inspiration due to their ambition to pursue multimodal, interdisciplinary musicological research.”

“It is a true privilege to teach and research at the FSU College of Music, where one is constantly surrounded by outstanding musicians and researchers,” Ryan said. “My work is greatly informed by my work with College of Music graduate students in classes I have taught over the past few years and by the cutting-edge, multi-modal work of my colleagues. It is a truly collegial atmosphere where we are supported in pursuing research that pushes the boundaries of our discipline, drawing on the strengths of the resources of a large College of Music.”

For more information, visit music.fsu.edu.

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