Research Support Grants

Our research support grant program is intended for faculty, independent researchers, and graduate students at the dissertation stage who are actively pursuing research that requires or would benefit from access to the holdings of the Maine Women Writers Collection.

MWWC Research Support Grants of up to $2000 may be used to defray travel, living, and research-related expenses relating to on-site visits (but cannot be used to fund travel to other research sites). International applicants are welcome.

How to apply

Applications should include the following:

Cover sheet with applicant’s name, address, e-mail address, and telephone number.
Present status and institutional affiliation (if any).
Working title of the project.
Length of proposed research visit to the MWWC.
List of financial support previously received for the project.
Proposed budget.
A one-page description of the project. Successful applicants will demonstrate their project’s relevance to the unique holdings of the MWWC as well as its significance to their field of study. Priority will be given to projects that require use of materials available only at the MWWC.
Curriculum vitae of no more than three pages.
Graduate students should also arrange to have a letter of reference sent directly to the MWWC. This letter should speak to the applicant’s scholarly experience, ability, and promise.

Applications will be reviewed by an interdisciplinary panel of staff and faculty from the University of New England. Recipients will be asked to write a brief, 250-word report on their research and to contribute to the MWWC a copy of any publications resulting from research in the Collection.

NEXT APPLICATION DEADLINE

September 1, 2024

SUBMISSIONS

Please send applications to:

Sarah Baker, Curator
Maine Women Writers Collection
University of New England
716 Stevens Avenue
Portland, Maine 04103-2670
sbaker8@une.edu

Email submissions preferred, hard copies accepted.

Questions

Questions may be directed to:

Sarah Baker, MWWC curator, (207) 221-4334, sbaker8@une.edu
Jennifer Tuttle, Dorothy M. Healy Professor, director of the MWWC, jtuttle@une.edu

Current Grant Recipients

2023-2024

Lynée Lewis Gaillet, Georgia State University, “Feminist Historiography and Archiving: The Transformational Power of Partnership”

Don James McLaughlin, University of Tulsa, “Tracing the Mentorship of Sarah Orne Jewett through Books: The Influence of the Jewett-Whitman Cover Design Collaboration”

Emma Thiébaut, Université Paris Cité, “A Pet after Their Own Heart? Queer Affective Relationships Between New England Women Writers and Their Pets”

Prior Grant Recipients

2022-2023: Sari Edelstein, University of Massachusetts Boston, “Celia Thaxter’s White Shoals”; Lisa McGunigal, University of Tampa, “The Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association: Changing the Patriotic Nineteenth-Century Literary Landscape”; Seth Spencer, University of Mississippi, “Assembled Authorship: American Women Writers and the Culture of Commonplacing”
2019-2020: Naomi Greyser, University of Iowa, “Writing through Writer’s Block: Race, Gender and Knowledge Cultures in the American Academy”; Vesna Kuiken, SUNY-Albany, “Life on the Rocks: Celia Thaxter’s Drift-Weed Aesthetics”; Shealeen Meaney, Russell Sage College, “American Women Writers in South Asia”; Christopher Phillips, Lafayette College, “Hand-Illustrated Print and 19th-Century Women’s Literary Culture”
2018-2019: Sarah Nance, United States Air Force Academy, “The Work of Diagnosis: Labor, Art and Illness”; Mary D. Roca, University of Florida, “Defying Expectations with Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm”
2017-2018: Lilith Acadia, University of California, Berkeley, “A Northampton Marriage: How the Writings of Mary Ellen Chase and Eleanor Shipley Duckett Discursively Define Their Relationship”; Ryan Charlton, University of Mississippi, “Alaska and the Arctic in the U.S. Imaginary, 1867-1912”; Isabel Dulfano, University of Utah, “Walking on (Y)our Sacred Path: IndigeNative Activist Women’s Voices from the Americas”; Carli Sinclair, University of Missouri, “‘This Land is My Land’: Landscape and Authority in American Women’s Nonfiction, 1843-1903”
2016-2017: Maura D’Amore, Saint Michael’s College, “Convalescent Child’s Play: Literary Bric-a-Brac After the Civil War”; Jillmarie Murphy, Union College, “Gendered Place Attachments and Nature as a Restorative Environment in Susan Fenimore Cooper’s Rural Hours and Celia Thaxter’s Among the Isles of Shoals”
2015-2016: Deborah Magid, playwright, “Healing Desire”; Ellen M. Taylor, University of Maine at Augusta, “Landscape and Legacy: the Poetry of Kate Barnes and Elizabeth Coatsworth”; Christa Holm Vogelius, University of Copenhagen, “Imaging Gender in America’s Literary Nationalism”
2014-2015: Elissa Zellinger, Armstrong State University, “Lyrical Strains: 1820-1920”; Rachel Snell, University of Maine, “‘Mistress, Mother, Nurse and Maid’ and Much More: Cookbooks and Middle-Class Women’s Experiences in the Anglo-American World, 1830-1880”
2013-2014: Kirin Makker, Hobart William Smith Colleges, “Myths of Main Street”; Kate Silbert, University of Michigan, “Committed to Memory: Gender, Literary Engagement, and Commemorative Practice, 1780-1830”
2012-2013: Kelsey Squire, Ohio Dominican University, “Relocating Regional Literature”; Faith Barrett, Duquesne University, “Poems and Parodies: Voice-Effects and the Profession of Poetry in Nineteenth-Century America”
2011-2012: Lisa Botshon, University of Maine at Augusta, “They Took to the Land: Maine Middlebrow Women Homesteaders”; Dorri Beam, Independent Scholar, “Margaret Sweat and Romantic Sexualities”
2010-2011: Alexandra Socarides, University of Missouri, “The Politics of Recovery: Rethinking the Disappearance of American Women’s Poetry”; Jennifer Putzi, The College of William and Mary, “Reproving Female Authorship: Elizabeth Akers Allen and the ‘Rock Me to Sleep’ Controversy”
2008-2009: Elizabeth Bischof, University of Southern Maine, “Focusing on Home: Chansonetta Stanley Emmons’ Maine”; Rebecca Jaroff, Ursinus College, “Elizabeth Oakes Smith, an Antebellum Maine Regionalist Writer”
2007-2008: Melanie Gustafson, University of Vermont, “Harriet Hubbard Ayer and Blanche Willis Howard: Educating Women for Success”; Scott Slawinski, Western Michigan University, “Sally Wood: The Life and Works of Maine’s First Gothic Novelist”
2006-2007: Karen A. Weyler, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Scholarly edition of Sally Sayward Barrell Keating Wood’s Dorval; Jennifer Putzi, The College of William and Mary, “Female Genius in the Correspondence of Elizabeth Stoddard and Margaret Jane Mussey Sweat”
2005-2006: Rita Bode, Trent University, “Harriet Prescott Spofford, Writer and Friend”; Kelly L. Lankford, Grand Valley State University, “Josephine Peary: Beyond the North Pole”
2004-2005: Janet Galligani Casey, Skidmore College, “Gladys Hasty Carroll and the Popularization of Rurality”; Ann M. Ingram, Davidson College, “The Culture of Flowers in Nineteenth Century America”
2003-2004: Mary Chapman, University of British Columbia, “‘Treacherous Texts’: American Suffrage Literature, 1848-1945”; Denise M. Kohn, Greensboro College, Scholarly edition of Christine: or The Trials and Triumphs of Woman, by Laura Curtis Bullard
2002-2003: Kathrine C. Aydelott, University of Connecticut, “Maine Stream: A Bibliographic Study of the Critical Reception of Sarah Orne Jewett”; Carrie J. Cole, University of Maryland, “The ‘Social’ Work of Women: Kate Douglas Wiggin and Women’s Charitable Speaking Engagements, 1895-1925”; Carolyn Gage, Playwright and Independent Scholar, “Lizzie Borden and Sarah Orne Jewett Play”; Susan D. Franzosa, University of New Hampshire, “Grey Days and Gold: A Biography of Kate Douglas Wiggin”
2001-2002: Patricia Pierce Erikson, Salt Institute for Documentary Studies, “Women Authoring Space in the ‘Public Sphere’ of Discovery”; Rose Marasco, University of Southern Maine, “Margaret Jane Mussey Sweat, 1823-1908,” Photograph exhibition at the MWWC and the Portland Museum of Art