Prof. Jessica Richard receives NEH grant for The Maria Edgeworth Letters Project

Jessica Richard, Associate Professor of English literature and Chair of the Department of English, has a received a $60,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities for The Maria Edgeworth Letters Project, a collaborative digital edition of the author’s letters shared by over 30 archives worldwide. 

The Anglo-Irish author Maria Edgeworth (1768-1849) was the most commercially successful novelist of her age, yet a comparatively small number of her letters have been published. Correspondences of her literary contemporaries and predecessors – Jane Austen, Frances Burney, William Godwin, Samuel Richardson, and Horace Walpole – have been published or are in progress with major university presses. This NEH grant will fund the creation of a fully searchable corpus of Edgeworth’s letters. 

Professor Richard is a general editor of the project along with Hilary Havens (University of Tennessee Knoxville), Robin Runia (Xavier University), and Susan Egenolf (Texas A&M). The digital team for the project includes Carrie Johnston and Meredith Barnes of Wake Forest University’s Digital Initiatives & Scholarly Communication Team, and Meredith Hale, who is a metadata librarian and assistant professor at University of Tennessee Knoxville. 

Learn more at inside.wfu.edu.