Michael Londry
Michael Londry completed his doctorate in English literature at the University of Oxford as a Commonwealth Scholar. His thesis was a critical edition of the works of the eighteenth centurypoet and feminist Elizabeth Tollet. Recently, at the University of Alberta as a Postdoctoral Fellow, he has researched a newly-surfaced manuscript volume that contains the text of the extensive commonplace book of Jane Collier, author of one of the best known prose satires of the mid eighteenth century, An Essay on the Art of Ingeniously Tormenting (1753). His articles have appeared in the TLS, The Library, Harvard Review, and the Oxford DNB, and his poems in Breathing Fire: Canada’s New Poets and The May Oxford and Cambridge Anthology of Poetry, as well as in journals in Canada and England. His long poem Aubade was published separately in 1999, having won the Hartley Prize at Balliol the previous year. In 2001 he was awarded the Richard Ellmann Prize by Oxford’s Professor of Poetry, Paul Muldoon.Dr. Londry’s research project at Beinecke is titled “The Hilda Londry Project: Women & Manuscript, 1700-1900.” The Hilda Londry Project is the first research project devoted to conducting a systematic analysis of a large, representative group of manuscript volumes containing English literature by or relating to women of the period 1700-1900. The Hilda Londry Collection is Dr. Londry’s own collection, which he began formingduring his doctoral studies at Oxford, and it holds over 2,900 manuscript poems or portions of poems. Dr. Londry will spend research time at the Beinecke comparing themanuscripts in his collection to manuscripts in the Osborn Collection. The Hilda Londry Project proposes to substantially supplement the knowledge of women’s writing provided by such recent projects as the Oxford DNB, the Orlando Project at the University of Alberta, and the Perdita Project at Nottingham.