Maria Edgeworth Letters

Principal Investigators

General Editors
The four general editors are Jessica Richard (Wake Forest University), Susan Egenolf (Texas A&M University), Hilary Havens (University of Tennessee), and Robin Runia (Xavier University of Louisiana).

Jessica Richard is an associate professor of eighteenth-century English literature at Wake Forest University. She specializes in eighteenth-century British fiction. She has published on gambling in eighteenth-century British culture, Jane Austen, Samuel Johnson, and polar exploration. She is author of The Romance of Gambling in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel (Palgrave. 2011) and editor of The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia by Samuel Johnson (Broadview, 2008). Her current book project is on alternative forms of education in eighteenth-century British culture. She is a founding co-editor of The Eighteenth-Century Common (https://www.18thcenturycommon.org/), a public humanities website for enthusiasts of eighteenth-century studies.

Hilary Havens is an associate professor of eighteenth-century English literature at the University of Tennessee. She is the team’s project representative at the NEH Institute for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities: Building Capable Communities for Crowdsourced Transcription. She is author of Revising the Eighteenth-Century Novel: Authorship from Manuscript to Print (Cambridge UP, 2019); editor of Didactic Novels and British Women’s Writing, 1790-1820 (Routledge, 2017) and the co-editor of the correspondence of Samuel Richardson and Edward Young, which is forthcoming in volume 8 of the Cambridge Edition of the Correspondence of Samuel Richardson. She is under contract with Cambridge University Press to edit two editions of Frances Burney’s Cecilia.

Susan Egenolf is an associate professor of English at Texas A&M University. Her interests are late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century British and Irish Literature, Women Writers, Environmental Literature, the Novel, Material Culture Studies, and the Visual Arts. She is author of The Art of Political Fiction in Hamilton, Edgeworth, and Owenson (Ashgate/Routledge, 2009), editor of the Wives and Mothers and Extended Families volumes of British Family Life, 1780-1914 (Pickering and Chatto/Routledge, 2013), and guest curator of the exhibit Gods in the Western Midlands: The Immortal Achievements of Wedgwood, Woodall & Webb (Forsyth Galleries, Texas A&M, 2018). Her monograph-in-progress is “Josiah Wedgwood and the Shaping of British Art and Empire.”

Robin Runia is an associate professor of English at Xavier University of Louisiana. She has published essays on gender, sexuality, and race in a number of journals and edited volumes. She is also the editor of The Future of Feminist Eighteenth Century Scholarship: Beyond Recovery (Routledge, 2020), featuring the work of scholars exploring new texts and theoretical methods in women's writing; editor of the Early Modern Feminism series (University of Delaware Press); and editor of Moral Tales: A Selection by Hannah More, Amelia Opie, and Maria Edgeworth (Broadview, 2021). Her monograph project “Maria Edgeworth and Abolition: Critiquing Character” is under review. She is currently at work on a new project exploring women’s friendship and divorce in the late eighteenth-century novel.

Digital Team

Carrie Johnston, Project Manager, is the Digital Humanities Research Designer in the Z. Smith Reynolds Library at Wake Forest University. In this position, she collaborates with faculty from across disciplines to incorporate computational methods and digital technologies into scholarly research projects. She holds a Ph.D. in English from Southern Methodist University. Her work on women’s literature and labor issues in digital humanities has appeared in American Quarterly, Studies in the Novel, College Literature, and Amerikastudien / American Studies. As the Maria Edgeworth Letters project manager, she provides technical support and facilitates communication between researchers, librarians, and technology specialists across the four participating institutions to ensure the timely completion of project milestones.

Heather Barnes is Digital Curation Librarian on the Digital Initiatives and Scholarly Communication (DISC) team at ZSR. Prior to joining ZSR, Heather was a Graduate Research Assistant at UNC Chapel Hill's School of Information and Library Science, where she received her PhD. She has worked with several digital library projects, including the Folkstreams documentary film preservation project, Duke University's Archive of Documentary Arts, and The Sun Magazine's digital conversion project. She serves as consultant for digital archive workflows, data management, preservation, metadata, and curation.

Meredith Hale is an Assistant Professor and Metadata Librarian at the University of Tennessee. She holds master’s degrees in Information Science and Art History from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and in English literature from the University of Sussex. At Tennessee, she manages the creation and sharing of MODS metadata for digitized special collections materials and provides technical support to the Digital Library of Tennessee, the state’s DPLA service hub. She will assist the project team with developing workflows and will ensure that the project metadata is consistent and aligns with the Dublin Core.

Molly Keener is the Director of Digital Initiatives and Scholarly Communication in the Z. Smith Reynolds Library at Wake Forest University. She will consult on matters of copyright and image sharing permissions.

Advisory Board, Research Assistance, and Technical Assistance
Advisory Board for Maria Edgeworth Letters, 2021-26
Pamela Clemit, Queen Mary University of London
Claire Connolly, University College Cork, Ireland
Tim Fulford, De Montfort University
Devoney Looser, Arizona State University
Susan Manly, University of St. Andrews
Patricia Matthew, Montclair State University
Clíona Ó Gallchoir, University College Cork, Ireland
Laura Runge, University of South Florida

Current Research Assistants
Autumn Hall, University of Tennessee
Zoie Irby, Wake Forest University
Jamie Kramer, University of Tennessee
Eliza Wilcox, University of Tennessee

Past Research Assistants
Katie Haire, University of Tennessee
Ivy Kiernan, University of Tennessee
Ziona Kocher, University of Tennessee
Seolha Lee, Texas A&M University