2027 Distinguished Scholar Award Recipients: Michael Gamer, Saree Makdisi, and Maureen McLane

Michael Gamer writes on how media ecologies impact aesthetic forms, especially Poetry, the Gothic, and the Stage. He is the recipient of A British Academy Global Professorship (2020-24).

With Angela Wright, he is the General Editor of the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ann Radcliffe; his edition of The Italian (2026) has recently launched that series. This coming academic year should see the launch of a comprehensive performance database on Romantic Melodrama, which Penn alumna Dr. Deven Parker (Leverhume Fellow, University of Glasgow) and Gamer are designing.

Dr. Gamer’s books include Romanticism and the Gothic (Cambridge, 2000) and Self-Canonization, and the Business of Poetry (Cambridge 2017). Collaborative monographs include (with the Multigraph Collective) Interacting with Print: Modes of Reading in the Age of Print Saturation (Chicago, 2018), and (with Diego Saglia of the University of Parma) A Cultural History of Tragedy in the Age of Empire (Bloomsbury, 2019).

His work on genre and canon formation includes several editions and anthologies, including Women's Travel Writing in India: Volume 2: Harriet Newell's Memoirs and Eliza Fay's Letters (Pickering and Chatto, 2021, co-edited with Katrina O'Loughlin of Brunel University of London), Lyrical Ballads 1798 and 1800 (Broadview, 2008, co-edited with Dahlia Porter of the University of Glasgow), Charlotte Smith's Manon L'Escaut and the Romance of Real Life (Pickering and Chatto, 2005), The Broadview Anthology of Romantic Drama (Broadview, 2003, co-edited with Jeffrey Cox of the University of Colorado at Boulder), and Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (Penguin, 2002).

Saree Makdisi is Professor of English & Comparative Literature at UCLA. His teaching and research are situated at the crossroads of several different fields, including British Romanticism, imperial culture, colonial and postcolonial theory and criticism, and the cultures of urban modernity, particularly the revision and contestation of charged urban spaces, including London, Beirut and Jerusalem. He has also written extensively on the afterlives of colonialism in the contemporary Arab world, and, in addition to his scholarly articles, has also contributed pieces on current events to a number of newspapers and magazines, including the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian, and the London Review of Books.

His most recent book is Tolerance is a Wasteland: Palestine and the Culture of Denial (University of California Press, 2022). He is also the author of Reading William Blake (Cambridge University Press, 2015); Making England Western: Occidentalism, Race, and Imperial Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2014); Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation (Norton, 2010); William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s (University of Chicago Press, 2003); and Romantic Imperialism (Cambridge University Press, 1998). He is the co-host of the Makdisi Street Podcast and co-author, with his brother Ussama, of Anti-Palestinianism, forthcoming from WW Norton in the US and Hamish Hamilton/Penguin in the UK in 2027.

Maureen N. McLane is a scholar, poet, memoirist, critic, and educator; her work often arises from the conjunction of romanticism and/or now. Her research and teaching focus on British romanticism and longer histories of poetries mainly in English. She is the author Balladeering, Minstrelsy, and the Making of British Romantic Poetry (Cambridge, 2008) and Romanticism and the Human Sciences: poetry, population, and the discourse of the species (Cambridge, 2000), as well as co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to British Romantic Poetry (Cambridge, 2008). She is also the author of an experimental hybrid of memoir and criticism, My Poets (2012), a New York Times Notable Book and Finalist for the National Books Critics Circle Award in Autobiography. Her most recent book is My Poetics (Chicago, 2024), an adventure in poeticriticism grounded in romanticism (looking at you, Shelley), anonymous balladry, modernist and contemporary poetries, and critical-theoretical vexations. She has collaborated with numerous romantics and romanticists, dead and living, including James K. Chandler and Celeste Langan.

McLane has also published eight books of poetry, including This Blue, Finalist for the National Book Award, and Some Say, Finalist for the Audre Lorde/Publishing Triangle Award and for The Believer Award in Poetry. Her most recent book of poems is What You Want (FSG; Penguin UK, 2023). Her poems have recently appeared in London Review of Books, The Paris Review, Poesia (Italy), The New York Review of Books, n+1, Ludd Gang, and PN Review (UK), and her work has been translated into French, Italian, Greek, Spanish, and Czech. Her essays on poetry, fiction, teaching, and sexuality have appeared widely, in (e.g.) Critical Inquiry, Representations, ELH, the LRB, The New York Times Book Review, and Public Books. She is the Henry James Professor of English and American Letters at New York University. Before coming to NYU, she taught at Harvard, MIT, and the University of Chicago. She has, as of yet, no tattoos.