Fordham London Hosts Symposium on Influential American Poet Amy Lowell
The symposium organizers including Prof Fernald
On Friday May 23rd 2025, Fordham University London hosted the multi-university symposium Amy Lowell and Her Imagist Networks. This one-day event emerged from the collaborative research of Fordham English’s Prof Anne Fernald and Prof Melissa Bradshaw of Loyola University Chicago, joined by co-organizers Oriane Chevalier of Clémont-Ferrand, Sarah Parker of Loughborough University, and Hannah Roche of the University of York. Organized in honor of the centenary of Lowell’s death (1874-1925), paper topics included the complexities of her identity as a female poet at the turn of the twentieth century and her influence within networks of Imagist poets including Ezra Pound, Robert Frost, and William Carlos Williams. A Keynote paper from Leslie A. Morris, Gore Vidal Curator of Modern Books and Manuscripts at Harvard University’s Houghton Library, discussed Lowell’s role as one of the foremost rare book collectors of her time—and one of the only women collectors—whose collection of original manuscripts by British Romantic poet John Keats became the defining gift of Harvard’s Keats collection, the largest in the world.
Lowell posthumously won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1926, for her collection What’s O’Clock. Despite her level of fame, and sometimes controversy, during her lifetime, Lowell has often been left out of scholarly discussions on the experimental, modernist literary scene of which she was a vital and central figure. Since May, The Amy Lowell Letters Project has been awarded a Scholarly Editions and Translations Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities in their most recent awards cycle. This 36 month, $300,000 award will support the creation of a searchable, open-access, digital scholarly edition of Lowell's never before collected letters. These correspondences with her literary contemporaries contain fascinating insights into the artistic and personal communities that were so pivotal to the development of modern American poetry. Fordham's Prof Fernald is a co-investigator on the grant, working alongside Prof Bradshaw. With this exciting project to come, the original, invigorating research presented at May’s symposium highlights the value and potential of Fordham London as a venue for international academic collaboration and community.
Speaker Oriane Chevalier from Université Clermont Auvergne discusses a French translation of What’s O’Clock