2026 Distinguished Scholar Award Recipients: Julia M. Wright and Richard C. Sha
Julia M. Wright, FRSC, is George Munro Chair of Literature and Rhetoric at Dalhousie University. She was a Canada Research Chair in English and Cultural Studies (2002-05) before moving to Dalhousie to take up a Canada Research Chair in European Studies (2005-12).
She has worked extensively on ideas of nationhood in literature of the Romantic era, including intersections with gender, medical thought, and the representation of the Atlantic. She is especially interested in Irish literature of that era and the Gothic. She is the author of five monographs, most recently Thomas Moore and the Transatlantic, 1800-1840: The Local, the Global, and the Mobile (Edinburgh UP, 2025). She edited two of Lady Morgan’s novels for Broadview Press, the anthology, Irish Literature, 1750-1900 (Wiley, 2008), and the two-volume Companion to Irish Literature (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), and co-edited a further seven volumes, including two collections with Joel Faflak, Nervous Reactions: Victorian Recollections of Romanticism (SUNY, 2004) and A Handbook to Romanticism Studies (Wiley-Blackwell, 2016).
Her collaborative work extends to projects with scholars in other disciplines, including expert panels for the Royal Society of Canada’s Task Force on COVID-19 and recent articles on medical subjects. She has also published more widely in cultural studies on such topics as university governance and television. View a list of some of her publications here.
Richard Chih-Tung Sha, Professor of Literature and Affiliate of the Center for Neuroscience and Behavior at American University in Washington, DC, is the author of three monographs, the editor or co-editor of seven volumes, and the author of 51 articles. He is currently working on Lashed to the Mast: The Cost of Our Emotion Models, for which he has just been fortunate to receive a Gates Distinguished Humanities Scholar Fellowship from the Maison de la Création et l’Innovation at the University of Grenoble for AY 2026-27. Growing up in an Asian American family where the emotions of others were rarely on display but never absent, he always wondered what the emotions were and why they are so important. When he discovered the Romantics, they were like crack.
His books include Imagination and Science in Romanticism (Johns Hopkins UP, 2018); Perverse Romanticism: Aesthetics and Sexuality in Britain, 1750-1850 (Johns Hopkins UP, 2009); and The Visual and Verbal Sketch in Romanticism (Penn Press, 1998). Together with Mark Lussier, he has edited The Rise of Rhythm (Bloomsbury 2026). And with Joel Faflak, he has edited Romanticism and Consciousness, Revisited (Edinburgh 2022) and Romanticism and the Emotions (Cambridge 2014). He vets articles for 24 journals in 7 countries. He loves teaching students, especially those with insatiable wonder, and has received three teaching awards.