Rate My Professor Melissa Bradshaw

Melissa Bradshaw is a Senior Lecturer and Writing Program Director in the Department of English at Loyola University Chicago, positions she has held since 2022 and 2010, respectively. She previously served as Writing Across the Curriculum Coordinator at Loyola from 2014 to 2022, and as Lecturer and Advanced Lecturer in the English Department. Bradshaw earned her Ph.D. in English with a certificate in Women’s Studies from Stony Brook University in 2000, M.A. in English from Brigham Young University in 1994, and B.A. in English from Brigham Young University in 1992. Before joining Loyola, she was Assistant Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at DePaul University from 2004 to 2010, Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Humanities at Barat College of DePaul University from 2002 to 2004, and Postdoctoral Fellow at SUNY Stony Brook from 2000 to 2002.

Bradshaw’s research examines collective cultural memories that inform understandings of celebrity, poetry, dance, and performance in the early twentieth century, particularly representations of powerful public women poets such as Amy Lowell, Edith Sitwell, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and others. She is the author of Amy Lowell: Diva Poet (Ashgate Press, 2011), which won the Modern Language Association Book Prize for Independent Scholars, and editor of “this need to dance / this need to kneel”: Denise Levertov and the Poetics of Faith (Wipf and Stock, 2019), Amy Lowell, American Modern: Critical Essays (Rutgers University Press, 2004), and Selected Poems of Amy Lowell (Rutgers University Press, 2002). Her peer-reviewed articles and chapters include “Wheelpolitik: The Moral and Aesthetic Project of Edith Sitwell’s Wheels, 1916-1921” (Edinburgh University Press, 2019), “Lady Macbeth Goes to Hollywood: Edith Sitwell’s 1950-1951 American Tour” (Modernism/modernity, 2016), and guest-edited special issues of Feminist Modernist Studies on “Feminist Modernist Dance” (2021, 2022). As Principal Investigator and Project Director for The Amy Lowell Letters Project, an open-access digital archive, she received a $300,000 National Endowment for the Humanities Scholarly Editions and Translations grant in 2025, along with an NEH-Mellon Foundation Fellowship for Digital Publication ($60,000, 2021-2022), Houghton Library Visiting Fellowship (2023-2024), and multiple Newberry Library fellowships. Bradshaw teaches courses in pedagogical theory, writing studies, celebrity culture, and Chicago literature.