Meredith Marie Neuman
Department of English
Clark University
950 Main Street
Worcester MA 01610
508-793-7298
meneuman@clarku.edu
Education
2004 Ph.D., University of California, Los Angeles, English
1994-96 Non-degree graduate work in English, University of Illinois Chicago
1989 B.A., University of Chicago, Classics
Appointments
Associate Professor of English, Clark University, 2012-present
Adjunct Associate of History, Clark University, 2012-present
Assistant Professor of English, Clark University, 2005-2012
Teaching Assistant/Teaching Fellow, UCLA, 1997-2004
Areas of Research and Teaching
Early and antebellum American literature; Puritan literature, religion early modern literature; poetry, poetry performance, manuscript and “amateur” poetry; book history, manuscript culture, material textuality, American print culture.
Selected Fellowships and Grants
2016 Folger Shakespeare Library short-term fellowship
2015 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Library Company of Philadelphia / Robert L. McNeil Jr. Fellow, Historical Society of Pennsylvania short-term fellowship
2012 Davis Educational Foundation grant (awarded through Clark University) for new course development
2012, Higgins School of the Humanities, Clark University, grant to attend
2010 Rare Book School, University of Virginia
2009 American Antiquarian Society-NEH long-term fellowship
2009 Folger Shakespeare Library short-term fellowship
2008 Massachusetts Historical Society-NEH long-term fellowship
2008 William Andrews Clark Memorial Library short-term fellowship (declined)
2007 Higgins School of the Humanities, Clark University, summer research grant
2004-05 Ahmanson-Getty Postdoctoral Fellow, UCLA Center for 17th- and 18th-C Studies &
The William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, Los Angeles, CA
2002-03 James E. Phillips Dissertation Fellowship, UCLA
2002 William Andrews Clark Memorial Library Pre-dissertation Fellowship, UCLA
Honors and Awards
2016 Honorable mention for Jeremiah’s Scribes for the Richard L. Greaves Prize by the International John Bunyan Society
2012- Elected Member, American Antiquarian Society
2011-12 Alice Coonley Higgins Faculty Fellow, Higgins School of the Humanities, Clark University
2009-10 Outstanding Teacher Award, Clark University
2008 Hodgkins Junior Faculty Award, Clark University
2006-07 Higgins School Junior Faculty Fellow, Higgins School of Humanities, Clark University
1989 John G. Hawthorne Award for Classical Studies, University of Chicago
Book
Jeremiah’s Scribes: Creating Sermon Literature in Puritan New England (University of Pennsylvania Press, Material Texts series, 2013)
Selected Articles, Reviews, Reference, and Editing
“Manuscript Culture & Print” for The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture, ed. Gary Kelly. Vol. 5, US Popular Print Culture to 1860, eds. Ronald J. Zboray and Mary Saracino Zboray (Oxford UP, forthcoming 2018).
“Errand into Exceptionalism: the Early Election Sermon in Retrospect,” in Stories of Nation: Fictions, Politics, and the American Experience. Eds. Martin Griffin and Christopher Herbert. Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, forthcoming early 2017).
Feature editor, “Esther Forbes: the Artist in the Archive,” The Worcester Review 36.1-2 (2015).
Review of Vincent Carretta, Phillis Wheatley: Biography of a Genius in Bondage (The University of Georgia Press) in Church History, December 2013.
“The Versified Lives of Unknown Puritans” The Papers of the Bibliographic Society of America, 2013.
Entry on “Sermons” in Encyclopedia of the American Enlightenment. Ed. Mark G. Spencer. New York and London: Continuum, 2012.
“Puritan History in the Present Tense.” Review of Sarah Vowell, The Wordy Shipmates (New York: Riverhead Books, 2008) in Common-Place January 2009. www.common-place.org.
Review of David Read, New World, Known World: Shaping Knowledge in Early Anglo-American Writing (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2005) in New England Quarterly, September 2006.
“Beyond Narrative: John Dane’s A Declaration of Remarkable Providences” Early American Literature 40.2, 2005.
Entries on “Samuel Danforth,” “Edward Johnson,” Jonathan Mitchell,” “Samuel Sewall,” and “William Wood” for The Greenwood Encyclopedia of American Poetry. Jeffrey H. Gray, James McCorkel, and Mary Balkun editors. Greenwood Publishing Group, 2005.
“Pilgrim’s Progress.” British and Irish Literature and Its Times: Celtic Migrations to the Reform Bill (beginnings-1830s). Ed. Joyce Moss and Lorraine Valestuk. Detroit: Gale Group, 2001. Pp. 339-48.
Selected Conference Papers, Presentations, and Responses
“Mather Family Library.” part of panel discussion on “The Future of Early American Library History: Needs & Opportunities,” Society of Early Americanists Biennial Conference, Tulsa, OK, March 2017
Respondent for talk by Leonard Von Morze, American Literature and Culture Seminar, Mahindra Humanities Center, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, March 2017
“Manuscripts,” part of an invited state-of-the field roundtable, Early American Material Texts, McNeil Center for Early American Studies, Philadelphia, PA, May 2016
Comment, “Making Sense of the Mathers,” American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies conference, Pittsburg, PA, March/April 2016
“Before They Were Famous (Not That They Ever Were Famous): Juvenilia, Amateurism, and Poetic Practice in Early America,” Society for the Study of American Women Writers Conference, Philadelphia PA, November 2015
“No Religion but in Things” roundtable, OIEAHC-Society of Early Americanists Conference, Chicago IL, June 2015
“Rabbit Holes and Metadata: Describing the Mather Library at the American Antiquarian Society.” Digital Antiquarian Conference, American Antiquarian Society, Worcester MA, May 2015
“Increase Mather Went to London, and All I Got Was This Bibliographic Headache: Questions and the Archive,” London and the Americas, 1492-1812, Special conference of the Society of Early Americanists hosted by Kingston University UK, July 2014
Respondent, “London Bound: Dissenting Protestants of British North America,” London and the Americas, 1492-1812, Special conference of the Society of Early Americanists hosted by Kingston University UK, July 2014
“Saving Mistress Bradstreet (a brief history),” C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists Biennial Conference (“The Commons”), Chapel Hill NC, March 2014
“A couplet and a quatrain walk into a tavern…; or, Rhyme scheme in early America,” Midwest Modern Language Association, Milwaukee WI, November 2013. (Also served as organizer and chair for this panel, “Reclaiming a Barbarous Artifice: Creative Research into the Work of Rhyme”)
“Speaking for Others: the Vicarious Experiences of Poetic Convention,” Society of Early Americanists Biennial Conference, Savannah GA, March 2013
“The Versified Lives of Unknown Puritans,” special conference on Poetry and Print, American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, MA, September 2012
“Margins of Stability: Translation, Literal Sense, and the Puritan Plain Style,” special conference on The King James Bible and Its Cultural Afterlife, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, May 2011
“On Mediocrity: Sentimental Modes and Pious Versifiers,” Society of Early Americanists Biennial Conference, Philadelphia PA, March 2011
“Unauthorizing Texts: Puritan Notetaking and Sermon Publication,” American Antiquarian Society academic seminar series, Worcester, MA, October 2009
“Puritan as Theorist ,” American Comparative Literature Association 2009 Annual Meeting: Global Languages, Local Cultures, American Comparative Literature Association, Cambridge, MA, April 2009
“‘a tedious piece of work’” (part of roundtable on “Manuscripts in an Age of Print”), Society of Early Americanists Biennial Conference, Hamilton Bermuda, March 2009
Respondent, “The History of the Book and Early American Literature” Northeast MLA, Boston, MA, February 2009
Respondent, “Conversion, Identity and Otherness” (Religion and Literature Permanent Sections), Midwest MLA, Minneapolis, MN, November 2008
“Fundamentalism: a Puritan Perspective” (part of roundtable on “Puritan Promiscuities: Transnational, Transhistorical, and Interdisciplinary Dimensions of Contemporary Puritan Scholarship”), Society of Early Americanists Biennial Conference, Williamsburg, VA, June 2007
“Grace in a Hail of Bullets: Habits of Calvinist Thought in True Crime Cinema,” Midwest MLA, Chicago, IL, November 2006
“Poets and Confessors: Edward Taylor, Puritan Conversion and Problem of Divine Address ,” American Comparative Literature Association 2006 Annual Meeting: The Human and Its Others, Princeton University, NJ, March 2006
“Drunken Arrows and the Taste of Honey: Seventeenth-Century Continuities in Edwards’ ‘Rhetoric of Sensation,’” Midwest MLA, Milwaukee, WI, November, 2005
“Telling and Time: Ruptured Conversion Stories in Seventeenth-Century New England,” “Temporalities,” William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, Los Angeles, CA, May 2005
“Was Anyone Ever Converted by a Sermon Cycle?”, Society of Early Americanists Biennial Conference, Alexandria VA, March 2005
Invited Talks and Symposia
“Desiderata: Fantasies of Print Culture and Early American Poetry,” American Antiquarian Society academic seminar series, Worcester, MA, November 2016.
“Inevitabilities of the Book” symposium, Yale Program in the History of the Book, Yale University, New Haven, CT, September 2016.
“What’s the Matter with Early American Poetry?” Americanist Research Colloquium, UCLA Department of English, Los Angeles CA, June 2015.
“Crumbling, Collating, and Enabling; or, How to Write Puritan Literature,” Fordham University, April 2013
“Listening to the Notetakers: Understanding Sermon Culture in Puritan New England,” History Department Colloquium, Clark University, February 2012
“Unauthorized Puritans,” Higgins Faculty Series, Clark University, February 2011
“Unauthorizing Texts: Puritan Notetaking and Sermon Publication,” Regional Academic Seminar, American Antiquarian Society, October 2009
Selected Professional Activities
“Reading Seventeenth-Century Handwriting,” workshop organizer and instructor, with Ashley Cataldo, at the Society of Early Americanists, biennial conference, Tulsa, OK, spring 2017
“Why We Can’t Read Nineteenth-Century Poetry,” participant in seminar convened by Virginia Jackson and Michael Cohen, C19 conference, State College, PA
Courses in “Introduction to Descriptive Bibliography,” “Analytic Bibliography,” and “Introduction to the History of Bookbinding,” Rare Book School at the University of Virginia, summers 2010 & 2012
Faculty weekend seminar on “Managing Scholarly Information Before the Modern Age” at the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington DC, winter 2011
Summer Seminar (History of the Book), “Books and Their Readers to 1800 and Beyond,” American Antiquarian Society, summer 2006
Creative Work
Untitled audiobook project of Anne Bradstreet’s 1678 edition of Several Poems, with Meghan Monk, Caitlin Indermaur, et alia, in progress
“Witch-Hunting: What’s In It For Me?”, sound installation performance, recorded with Meghan Monk, Tom Rhalter, Sabrina Taveras, and Caitlin Indermaur. Performed November 2014 as part of past present futures, curated by NYPAC (New York Performance Artists Collective) at the Knockdown Center, Queens, NY
“Questions of Faith,” spoken-word chorus based on interviews conducted with Clark University students, written with Ayaan Agane and Heather Cenedella. Performed October 2007 at Razzo Hall, Clark University, Worcester, MA
Courses Taught
Undergraduate courses:
- Introduction to Literature (special topics: “Science and Literature”; “Love and War”)
- Major American Writers I (survey themes: “American Ingenues”; “The Regions of ‘America’”; “How to Crack an American Chestnut”; “Early American Time Machine”; “The Anthology and Its Discontents”; “Public Domain”)
- American Poetry (special topics: “The Nineteenth Century Close Up”; “American Women Poets”; “Poetry and Orality”)
- Voicing the Verse: Poetry in Performance
- Senior Capstone (Moby-Dick; Paradise Lost)
Undergraduate/Graduate split-level seminars:
- American Print Culture, 1700-1900 (Special topics: “Race: Representation and Agency”; “Early African American Print Culture and the Challenges of the Archive”)
- American Literary Renaissance (Special topics: “Lydia Maria Child’s 19th Century”; “Transcendental Variations”; “Scribblers and Other Novelists”)
- Topics in 17th– and 18th-Century American Literature (“Early American Women Writers”; “Religious Discourse and Literary Theory”; “What’s the Matter with Early American Poetry?”)
- Topics in 17th-Century Literature (“Science, Religion, and the Arts”; “The Self and the Seventeenth Century”; “Books and Texts”; “Poetry, Theory, and Practice”)
- The Book in the Early Modern World (formerly Introduction to Archival Research)
Graduate seminars:
- Material/Text