Rate My Professor Melissa Bradshaw

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.