Skip to main content
Skip to main content

Neil Fraistat

Neil Fraistat profile photo

Emeritus Professor, English

(301) 405-5896

3220 Tawes Hall
Get Directions

Research Expertise

Romantic
Textual and Digital Studies

Neil Fraistat is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Maryland. He is Co-General Editor of the 8 volume edition, The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley. He has served as President of the Keats-Shelley Association of America and is a Co-Founder and General Editor of both the Romantics Circle Website and the Shelley-Godwin Archive. He also served for twelve years as Director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) and has chaired the international Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO) and Co-Founded and Co- Chaired centerNet, an international network of digital humanities centers. Fraistat has published widely on the subjects of Digital Humanities,Romanticism, and Textual Studies in various articles and in the eleven books he has authored or edited. He has been awarded both the Society for Textual Scholarship’s biennial Fredson Bowers Memorial Prize and the biennial Richard J. Finneran Prize; the Keats-Shelley Association Prize; honorable mention for the Modern Language Association’s biennial Distinguished Scholarly Edition Prize; the University of Maryland’s Kirwan Faculty Research and Scholarship Prize; and the Keats-Shelley Association’s Distinguished Scholar Award.

Awards & Grants

NEH Chairman’s Grant

PI, NEH Chairman’s Grant, Frankenreads, 2017-2018

English

Author/Lead: Neil Fraistat
Dates:
To commemorate the bicentennial of the publication of Frankenstein, the Keats-Shelley Association of America (K-SAA) proposes “Frankenreads,” a national/international series of public programs and educational curriculum that culminates in a public reading of Frankenstein on October 31, 2018.

Read More about NEH Chairman’s Grant

Mellon Foundation Grant

Synergies among Digital Humanities and African American History and Culture, 2015-18.

English

Author/Lead: Neil Fraistat
Dates:
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation will be used to plan the development of ARCScholar and to form its governance structure. ARCScholar will participate with other grant recipients in creating a system of cooperatives for publishing and sustaining digital editions.

Publications

“Data First: Remodeling the Digital Humanities Center.”

DH centers themselves have had changing roles over the years in local community training.

English

Author/Lead: Neil Fraistat
Dates:
Fraistat considers these changes in the context of the DH center as an institution.

Read More about “Data First: Remodeling the Digital Humanities Center.”

#SayHerName: a case study of intersectional social media activism

Social media activism presents sociologists with the opportunity to develop a deeper understanding of how groups form and sustain collective identities around political issues throughout the course of a social movement.

English

Author/Lead: Neil Fraistat
Dates:
his paper contributes to a growing body of sociological literature on social media by applying an intersectional framework to a content analysis of over 400,000 tweets related to #SayHerName. Our findings demonstrate that Twitter users who identified with #SayHerName engage in intersectional mobilization by highlighting Black women victims of police violence and giving attention to intersections with gender identity. #SayHerName is a dialogue that centres Black cisgender and transgender women victims of state-sanctioned violence. Additionally, #SayHerName is a space for highlighting Black women victims of non-police violence. Therefore, we propose that future research on social media activism should incorporate intersectionality as a basis for understanding the symbols and language of twenty-first century social movements.

Read More about #SayHerName: a case study of intersectional social media activism

“‘Editing Shelley’ Again.”

From Publishing, editing, and reception : essays in honor of Donald H. Reiman.

English

Author/Lead: Neil Fraistat
Dates:
Publishing, Editing, and Reception is a collection of twelve essays honoring Professor Donald H. Reiman, who moved to the University of Delaware in 1992.

“Only Connect: The Globalization of the Digital Humanities.”

This highly-anticipated volume has been extensively revised to reflect changes in technology, digital humanities methods and practices.

English

Author/Lead: Neil Fraistat
Dates:
The collection reviews institutional culture surrounding the valuation and publication of digital scholarship.

Read More about “Only Connect: The Globalization of the Digital Humanities.”

“Textual Scholarship in Age of Media Consciousness.”

Textual scholarship in the age of media consciousness.

English

Author/Lead: Neil Fraistat
Dates:
Found in Cambridge Companion to Textual Scholarship.

Read More about “Textual Scholarship in Age of Media Consciousness.”

The Cambridge Companion to Textual Scholarship

As more and more of our cultural heritage migrates into digital form and as increasing amounts of literature and art are created within digital environments, it becomes more important than ever before for us to understand how the medium affects the text.

English

Author/Lead: Neil Fraistat
Dates:

As more and more of our cultural heritage migrates into digital form and as increasing amounts of literature and art are created within digital environments, it becomes more important than ever before for us to understand how the medium affects the text. The expert contributors to this volume provide a clear, engrossing and accessible insight into how the texts we read and study are created, shaped and transmitted to us. They outline the theory behind studying texts in many different forms and offer case studies demonstrating key methodologies underlying the vital processes of editing and presenting texts. Through their multiple perspectives they demonstrate the centrality of textual scholarship to current literary studies of all kinds and express the sheer intellectual excitement of a crucial scholarly discipline entering a new phase of its existence.

The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley, vol. 3

Radical journalist and poet, Leigh Hunt, showcases Percy Bysshe Shelley’s discovery in 1816 of an extraordinary talent within "a new school of poetry rising of late."

English

Author/Lead: Neil Fraistat
Dates:

"His name is Percy Bysshe Shelley, and he is the author of a poetical work entitled Alastor, or the Spirit of Solitude." With these words, the radical journalist and poet Leigh Hunt announced his discovery in 1816 of an extraordinary talent within "a new school of poetry rising of late."

The third volume of the acclaimed edition of The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley includes Alastor, one of Shelley’s first major works, and all the poems that Shelley completed, for either private circulation or publication, during the turbulent years from 1814 to March 1818: Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, Mont Blanc, Laon and Cythna, as well as shorter pieces, such as his most famous sonnet, Ozymandias. It was during these years that Shelley, already an accomplished and practiced poet with three volumes of published verse, authored two major volumes, earned international recognition, and became part of the circle that was later called the Younger Romantics.

As with previous volumes, extensive discussions of the poems’ composition, influences, publication, circulation, reception, and critical history accompany detailed records of textual variants for each work. Among the appendixes are Mary W. Shelley’s 1839 notes on the poems for these years, a table of the forty-two revisions made to Laon and Cythna for its reissue as The Revolt of Islam, and Shelley’s errata list for the same.

It is in the works included in this volume that the recognizable and characteristic voice of Shelley emerges—unmistakable, consistent, and vital.