The National Endowment for Humanities is giving a near-$300,000 grant to Stockton University to preserve the legacy of late author Catharine Maria Sedgwick.

Sedgwick published 20 books and more than 150 shorter works in multiple genres in the early 19th century.

The NEH grant is part of $34.79 million awarded to 97 humanities projects across the country to support various humanities projects that celebrate the 250th anniversary of the United States.

Stockton literature professor Deborah Gussman, her co-editors and a group of Stockton graduate and undergraduate students will continue to add to an online archive of Sedgwick’s letters.

Gussman explained what Sedgwick’s legacy means.

“Sedgwick may be the most famous and innovative writer you’ve never heard of,” she said. “Her letters provide a window, from the perspective of a cultivated, well-connected single woman, into a wide range of important 19th-century issues, including authorship, gender roles, education, national and local politics, religious diversity, marriage, social reform and work. The letters are also a look into her fascinating and deeply reflective private life.”

The online letters project began around 2015, when Gussman brought her expertise on Sedgwick and digital humanities together with work on the letters begun by Sedgwick scholars Patricia Kalayjian of California State University-Dominguez Hills and Lucinda Damon Bach of Salem State University.

The project has 1,095 letters in its inventory — the first from the 1790s, when Sedgwick was about 9, and the last from the year she died in 1867, when she was 78. Most of the letters are currently only available through microfilm or as holographs in archives around the United States and abroad. Of that inventory, 432 letters are posted online with another 300 are ready to be digitized and uploaded sometime this fall.

Gussman further explained the outline of the project.

“The goal of the Catharine Maria Sedgwick Online Letters project is to provide an open-access, online edition of Sedgwick’s complete, unexpurgated outgoing letters as accurate, annotated transcriptions that adhere to the Association of Documentary Editing’s best practices,” she said.

Source: https://binje.com/stockton-university-lands-near-300k-neh-grant-to-digitize-letters-of-most-famous-writer-youve-never-heard-of/