Celebrating Regina Hewitt: Scholarship, Mentorship, and Service to Romantic Studies
The K-SAA thanks Regina Hewitt, recently retired from the University of South Florida, for twenty years of outstanding service as a member of the Carl H. Pforzheimer, Jr. Prize grants committee. During this time, the award has furthered the career of forty junior scholars, funding their research in Ghana, Jamaica, Spain, and the UK, among other countries. Below, a few colleagues share their appreciation for Professor Hewitt’s scholarly, editorial, and pedagogical contributions to the field. Prof. Hewitt is the author of The Possibilities of Society: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and the Sociological Viewpoint of English Romanticism (1997) and Symbolic Interactions: Social Problems and Literary Interventions in the Works of Baillie, Scott, and Landor (2006) and served as Co-Editor of European Romantic Review.
About Regina Hewitt: For K-SAA Thanks for Grants Committee Service
Inviting Regina Hewitt to join the Pforzheimer Grants Committee twenty years ago was one of the best professional decisions I ever made, but credit for it should go to my fellow K-SAA Board and Committee member at the time, Robert M. Ryan, who recommended her. Bob, who was Regina’s undergraduate mentor at Rutgers-Camden, described her as his jewel in the crown. Their paths were symmetrical. Bob had been one of the first students of Columbia University’s distinguished Romanticist Carl Woodring; Regina was his last. Both tether their work on a broad range of writers to the societal debates that defined their times. Regina became an invaluable member of the Committee—collegial, collaborative, and excellent company during our deliberations. After the first couple of years, my only fear—happily unrealized—was that that she might want to cycle off. Though a proposal subject rarely fell outside the range of her deep knowledge of our field, promising applications often foundered, because she noted crucial omissions from their required bibliographies. Her evaluations were unfailingly astute and incisive; her balance of merit and need, always discerning; her judgment, unerring and enviable; her sense of humor, refreshing. It was Regina’s arguments that most often brought us to consensus. I admire her as a scholar and cherish the friendship that formed from our work together.
Doucet Devin Fisher, NYPL
Former Grants Chair and K-SAA Board of Directors
For two decades, Regina Hewitt has been a constant on the grants committee of the K-SAA, lending her time and expertise each year to judge the Carl H. Pforzheimer, Jr. prize. An attentive critic and a generous reader, she is always able to see the person behind the research project. With forty prizes awarded under her care, she has helped to promote the work of a generation of emerging scholars in Romanticism. Regina generously shared her wisdom with me when I first came to chair the committee in 2021; she is the very model of collegiality. I am honored to have worked alongside her, and the K-SAA is indebted to her for her service.
Olivia Moy, City University of New York (Lehman)
K-SAA Grants Chair and Vice-President of Public Outreach
During the many years that Regina served as Co-Editor of European Romantic Review, the journal flourished under her dedicated, efficient, and ethical leadership. Since then, I have had the pleasure and privilege of working with Regina on various projects related to John Galt. In addition to her original research and meticulous editorial work on Galt’s writings, Regina serves as Chair of the John Galt Society, sits on the Editorial Board of the Edinburgh Edition of the Works of John Galt, and is an engaged member of the international community of Galt scholars. All of us who are involved in these projects recognize and deeply appreciate her intellectual generosity, her enthusiasm for collaborative scholarship, and her tireless efforts to support early-career scholars and reach out to the wider community.
Professor Angela Esterhammer, FRSC
Department of English, University of Toronto
Words on my long-time collaborator and friend, Regina Hewitt
At the time of our first correspondence, Regina Hewitt was already an established scholar of Romanticism. Her books, Wordsworth and the Empirical Dilemma (1990), The Possibilities of Society: Wordsworth, Coleridge and the Sociological Viewpoint of English Romanticism (1997), Symbolic Interactions: Social Problems and Interventions in the Works of Baille, Scott and Landor (2006), advanced sociological considerations of major figures of the period. She did this by offering readings that challenged formalist readings to open broader social questions. In fact, her attention to intellectual and social history and her commitment to explore the political impact of literature would guide our collaborative projects and have influenced my own work profoundly.
In 2009 I had submitted an article to European Romantic Review to which she, as an editor of the journal, responded enthusiastically. She steered me through reader responses and necessary revisions. One of the photos I submitted to accompany my article was an early twentieth-century photograph of a New York union activist wearing a suit with a pin on her lapel – Regina asked me, and I will never forget this, if I could identify what the pin was and if it had political significance? I had just finished my dissertation, was on the job market, and many days I felt overwhelmed by the life of a graduate student, but her attention to my work, the care that should took in responding to it, was more than reassuring – it was inspirational. After that article was published, and had landed a job as an assistant professor, I went on to develop a graphic novel about Percy Shelley’s “Mask of Anarchy” and labor organizers in lower Manhattan, a project that was supported by a Carl H. Pforzheimer Jr. Grant from the Keats-Shelley Association of America. I have long suspected that she may have been on the committee that selected my proposal.
I approached Regina again, this time directly as I had worked with her already, with a proposal to collaborate on an edited volume of essays on Peterloo. This would eventually become Commemorating Peterloo: Violence, Resilience and Claim-making during the Romantic Era (2019). If I came up with the initial idea as a green assistant professor, Regina brought her knowledge as a scholar, her experience as an editor, and her contacts. One has only to scan the list of contributors to the Peterloo volume to recognize that Regina has worked with many of the most prominent scholars in Romanticism – I was thrust into conversations with scholars whose work I had poured over, never imagining there were actual people who had authored them. I learned from Regina how to organize and frame such a project, to how to respond to feedback, how to write to contributors and how to offer feedback, and how to build relationships that carry on beyond a specific project. If you have corresponded with Regina, you know that she is methodical, diligent, and meticulous, and that she listens attentively, is passionate and committed, and will see things are done correctly. To this day, I am extraordinarily proud of our Peterloo collection. When we launched it at NASSR 2019 in Chicago, Regina and I had lunch, and I proposed another collection idea to her – naturally, I wanted our collaboration to continue.
I had grown interested in the history of prison reform and notions of rehabilitation in the Romantic era, and I knew that Regina had edited a special issue of European Romantic Review on “Romanticism and the Law” (2007). Now an associate professor, I proposed to her a new collection that would revisit Romantic articulations of personal and social amelioration read against a history of British correctional institutions. It was a project that came out the Peterloo volume but was less tied to an historical moment and would be more expansive in its range of topics. It took us some time to conceptualize the collection, it went through some dramatic reframing, and it was delayed by the pandemic, but ultimately it became Law, Equity and Romantic Writing: Seeking Justice in the Age of Revolutions (2024). It was our work on this volume that inspired the 2023 conference theme of the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism (NASSR) that I hosted at my home institution, and her work was the clear precedent to my own special issue of European Romantic Review on “Romanticism and Justice.”
I have worked with Regina at every stage of my career, and I am profoundly indebted to her. She has enriched my own scholarship, our collaborations have advanced my career, and she has inspired me to strive to the kind of probing, generous, committed, conscientious and thorough, and open-minded academic that she is. In recent years, Regina has emerged as a major John Galt scholar. Her 2012 book, John Galt: Observations and Conjectures on Literature, History, and Society, made her an obvious choice as an editor for the Edinburgh University Press’s Works of John Galt – her edition of Lawrie Todd: or The Settlers in the Woods was published in 2023 and I suspect she is at work on another edition… but I am impatient for our next collaboration. I would like to congratulate her for her 20 years of service on the Pforzheimer Grant committee.
Dr. Michael Demson
Professor of English, Department of English
Sam Houston State University
Thank you, Regina, for all your contributions and years of service.
— K-SAA Grants Committee and Community
