I teach writing, pedagogical, literary and cultural studies, and digital humanities at Loyola University Chicago.
My research focuses on the collective cultural rhetorics that inform our understanding of powerful public women. In other words, I write about divas, about how we tell their stories, and how the stories we tell about them shape who we are. I argue that public discourse, at its most pervasive and superficial, works to minimize the accomplishments of powerful women and pathologize their ambition.
My work on divas is informed by and participates in several subfields:
- cultural and visual rhetorics
- gender and sexuality studies
- performance studies
- women’s poetry
- modernism
- c19-c20 American and British literature
- book history
- periodical studies
- Chicago studies
I am the Principle Investigator and Project Director of The Amy Lowell Letters Project , a digital critical edition of the charismatic American poet’s letters. I serve on the advisory board of the Feminist inter/Modernist Association and am an associate editor and book review editor for the journal Feminist Modernist Studies, for which I have recently co-edited the first of two special issues on women in dance, 1870-1970 with Jessica Ray Herzogenrath, I serve on the editorial boards of NANO: New American Notes Online, Studies in Gothic Fiction and Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies.
melissa bradshaw 