Professor Wendy Wall awarded MLA Prize for The Pulter Project

Wendy Wall, professor in the  Department of English, has been awarded the Modern Language Association Prize for Collaborative, Bibliographical, or Archival Scholarship for her work,  The Pulter Project: Poet in the Making.

Wall is no stranger to awards. She has previously received the Charles Deering McCormick Professorship of Teaching Excellence (2016-19), a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities, a Teaching Award from Mortar Board, a Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Teaching Award, the College of Arts and Sciences AT&T Research Fellowship, and the Wender-Lewis Research and Teaching Professorship.

“The Pulter Project,” directed by Wall, is an open-access digital edition of the works of Hester Pulter, a 17th Century poet. It was devised as a tool to test how digital formats can display innovative principles of editing. Collaborative inquiry and research from worldwide Anglophone scholars were essential to the project, and the MLA award highlighted these efforts to emphasize process and materiality over authority and determination.

The MLA committee praised the project for giving access to Pulter’s canon and “the subsequent critical activity that has attended it as a window onto the scholarly editing process itself.” They deemed it “an exceptional example of textual and digital scholarship that is committed to being public-facing.”

See the full press release here.