Dr. Susan Rosenbaum receives British Arts and Humanities award

University of Georgia faculty member Susan Rosenbaum, along with Jonathan Ellis, Reader in American Literature at the University of Sheffield, received a $351,000 grant from Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) of UK Research and Innovation, a non-departmental public body sponsored by the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT).

Rosenbaum, associate professor in the UGA Franklin College of Arts and Sciences department of English, will serve as co-project lead on a 27-month project to develop an edited collection of Elizabeth Bishop’s postcards for general readership, along with a second scholarly book, An Art of Looks: Elizabeth Bishop and Visual Culture.

Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979) is one of the twentieth century’s most important and influential poets. Over a lifetime of peripatetic travel, she created watercolors, photographs, slides, and other artworks that profoundly influenced Bishop’s poetry.

In 2023, as part of an innovative pilot study, Rosenbaum and co-project lead Jonathan Ellis co-curated the first exhibition of Bishop’s picture postcards at the Vassar College Special Collections Library. The exhibition attracted widespread acclaim, featured in The New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, and The Times Literary Supplement. In April 2024 the exhibition traveled to Key West, Florida, to celebrate the reopening of the Elizabeth Bishop House, now the home of the Key West Literary Institute.

AHRC is the UK’s largest provider of response-led and strategic funding, advanced skills training and career development across the whole range of arts and humanities. They fund world-class, independent research in subjects from philosophy and the creative industries to art conservation and product design.

The AHRC grant project will expand the scope of this pilot study through European exhibitions and two major book publications. Bishop’s publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, has contracted Ellis and Rosenbaum to edit a trade book of 150-200 Bishop postcards. While the pilot study centered on Bishop’s postcards in the Vassar collection, research carried out at additional archives during the grant will allow the researchers to locate never-discussed postcards and to publish a book for the general reader. Research on Bishop’s visual art undertaken at these archives will also allow Rosenbaum and Ellis to complete a scholarly study, “An Art of Looks: Elizabeth Bishop and Visual Culture,” under advance contract with Harvard University Press.

“We are thrilled to expand our work on the extraordinary life and work of Elizabeth Bishop, to make the impact of this important American poet accessible to more people across the globe,” Rosenbaum said. “This second book will make a powerful case for approaching Bishop as an artist who worked across media, and for expanding the Bishop canon to incorporate the visual arts that she practiced.”

In collaboration with Ronald Patkus, Director of the Vassar Special Collections Library, and colleagues at the Sorbonne University, Rosenbaum and Ellis will design an exhibition at the Sorbonne Libraries, along with an international symposium on Poets and Postcards.

UGA support has been crucial to the development of this project and a successful AHRC grant application. Funding from the Willson Center for the Humanities and Arts Fellowship and Faculty Research Grant provided Rosenbaum with support for her travel and work for the pilot exhibition at Vassar. Subsequent funding from the Willson Center and the English Department supported the development and travel of the exhibition. A grant from the Franklin College Research Intensification Program has provided Rosenbaum with a course release and travel funding in Fall 2025 that will permit her travel to archives in the U.S. 

“It is gratifying to see the research enterprise so vibrantly championed across the humanities at our university, and I feel especially thankful to see this work come to fruition as a direct result of that support,” Rosenbaum said.

Image: Postcard to James Merrill. Photograph by Eadweard Muybridge, Camel Galloping (1887), by permission of Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.