Melissa Bradshaw

Dr. Bradshaw's research focuses on the collective cultural memories that inform our understanding of powerful, public women. She argues that public discourse, at its most pervasive and superficial level, works to minimize their accomplishments and pathologize their ambitions.

This theme informs much of her work, from her book monograph Amy Lowell, Diva Poet, to a Camera Obscura article on the arrogation of Janis Joplin’s life and career in the film The Rose, to a piece on FX’s Feud: Bette and Joan in the LA Review of Books. She primarily studies this phenomenon in representations of American and British women poets, with recent articles focusing on iconic photographs of Edith Sitwell. Her current book project, Collectible Women: Literary Celebrity and the Rhetorics of Remembering, traces narratives attached to American poets Edna St. Vincent Millay, Gertrude Stein, Sara Teasdale, Elinor Wylie, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Marianne Moore back to the images, ephemera, and archival materials that often stand in for their work in a culture more interested in poetic reputations than in poetry itself.

In addition to her book project, she is working on both print and digital critical editions of Amy Lowell’s selected letters.

As Writing Across the Curriculum Coordinator at Loyola, Dr. Bradshaw works with faculty and graduate students across the University to develop upper-division writing courses. 

Program Areas

• 19th and 20th-Century American and British Poetry
• Composition and Rhetoric
• Textual Studies and Digital Humanities
• Feminist and Queer Theory
• Women’s Studies and Gender Studies

Research Interests

• Feminist, Queer, and Gender Studies
• Archival Studies
• Epistolary Thoery
• Cultural Rhetorics
• Modernism
• Popular Culture