Current Research Projects
Robert D. Habich

My research interests are the intersections of literary history and biography, the New England Transcendentalists, and textual editing. All three of these interests are combined in my three current book projects, one of which has recently appeared, a second is forthcoming in 2009, and the third in review. In addition, I have begun related research on how author reputations are constructed through the agency of literary tourism.

Transcendentalism and Romanticism, vol. 3 of Research Guide to American Literature. Co-author with Robert C. Nowatzki. New York: Facts on File, Inc., forthcoming 2009.

The seven-volume Research Guide to American Literature, written by publishing scholars in the field, is designed to provide authoritative, challenging, and up-to-date research advice for college undergraduates.

My half of the book includes two long introductory essays, five guides to contextual topics (such as Transcendentalism and Literary professionalism), and fifteen essays on research issues for major authors and texts.

Lives Out of Letters: Essays on American Literary Biography and Documentation, in Honor of Robert N. Hudspeth (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2004)

A festschrift in honor of the editor of the letters of Margaret Fuller and the correspondence of Henry Thoreau, this collection includes a foreword, an introduction, seven essays on specific biographical topics from Bradford's epistolary record in Of Plymouth Plantation and the celebrity status of captivity narrators to Kay Boyle's reappraisals of the Lost Generation and Thomas Wolfe's conversion to social fiction after his visits to Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Following these essays are capstone essays on the craft of writing literary lives, written by prize-winning biographers Phyllis Cole, Charles Hackenberry, Robert Richardson, and Gary Scharnhorst.

As general editor of the book I wrote the contextual introduction on literary biography in the United States, invited the essayists, negotiated with the publisher, and oversaw the entire project as it moved through production.

Emerson's First Biographers: Life-writing, Reputation, and Commerce in Victorian America (in progress)

The decade of Emerson's death saw the wholesale reappraisal of a number of American Romantic writers, Hawthorne, Thoreau, and Fuller among them, but none was so studied and debated as Emerson. Indeed, for a century or more afterward the construction of Emerson as the "Sage of Concord" determined his reputation, his practical canon, and the interpretation of his works.

Following Richard Brodhead's theoretical lead, I am examining this biographical reappraisal of Emerson in a larger "culture of letters" that includes the contested definitions of the genre in the 1880s, the collateral influences of other representational media such as photography and portraiture, the politics of publication and reading in later Victorian America and England, the published and unpublished commentary on the six major biographies of Emerson to appear in the decade of his death, and the individual stories of his biographers, family, and friends, who balanced competition and collaboration with each other as they strove to create their own versions of Waldo Emerson.

Virtually all of the material for this project exists in manuscript letters, journals, and publishers' records. I have been working since 1999 to locate and transcribe the archival evidence for this project. In July 2006 I worked on the Holmes and Edward Emerson materials at the Harvard University Archives, and later with the Alexander Ireland Papers at the Manchester Central Library, England. During trips to New England in the summer of 2005, I worked at the Concord Free Public Library, the Boston Public Library, and the Fruitlands Museums in Harvard, Massachusetts. In the fall of 2004, as part of my assigned leave, I visited the archives at the Library of Congress, the Bentley Historical Society at the University of Michigan, the British Library, and the Centre for Writing, Publishing and Printing History at the University of Reading (U.K.) Other archives and manuscript collections that I have consulted include the following:

Concord Free Public Library (Edward Waldo Emerson papers, Rockwood Hoar Papers, Social Circle in Concord Papers)
Houghton Library, Harvard University (Emerson Family papers, letters of Oliver Wendell Holmes and the records of the Houghton, Mifflin Company)
Andover-Harvard Divinity School library (biographical records for George Willis Cooke, Emerson's first biographer)
Massachusetts Historical Society (Oliver Wendell Holmes, William Hathaway Forbes, and Edward Emerson manuscripts)
Boston Museum of Fine Arts library (faculty records for Edward Emerson)
Beverly (Mass.) Historical Society (Oliver Wendell Holmes and James Elliot Cabot records of summer activities)
Hatcher Graduate Library, University of Michigan (the letters of Alexander Ireland)
Dickinson College (Pennsylvania) Library (Moncure Daniel Conway papers)
Rare Books Library at Columbia University (Conway Family Collection)
The Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe (Hugh Cabot Papers)
Dedham (Massachusetts) Historical Society (George W. Cooke ministry records)
Indiana State Library (George W. Cooke records)
Indiana Historical Society (George W. Cooke ministry records)
Phillips Library, Peabody Essex Museum, Salem (Elizabeth Palmer Peabody papers)
The Watkinson Library, Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut (the Charles Dudley Warner Papers).
University of Glasgow Special Collections (Alexander Ireland letters)

As a preliminary stage in the book-length study, I presented a paper entitled "Building Their Own Waldos: Holmes, Cabot, and Edward Emerson and the Challenges of Biography in the 1880s" at Spires of Form: The Emerson Bicentennial Conference, held April 25-26, 2003 at the Massachusetts Historical Society, part of the larger set of activities in Boston and Cambridge to commemorate the 200th anniversary of Emerson's birth. Some pedagogical implications of the study were presented as "Teaching Literary Lives: Biography in the American Romantic Classroom," a paper at the College English Association national meeting, April 3-5, 2003, St. Petersburg, FL.

More recently, a version of the "Spires of Form" has been published in Emerson Bicentennial Essays, ed. Ronald A. Bosco and Joel Myerson (Massachusetts Historical Society, distributed by the University of Virginia Press, 2006). In July 2006 I presented "Emerson's English Biographers" at a conference on Transatlanticism in American Literature at the Rothermere American Institute and St. Catherine's College, Oxford University. During summer 2007 I made two additional presentations based on my research: a workshop entitled "Thoreau 101: Henry Thoreau and His Friends" at the Thoreau Society Annual Gathering in Concord and a paper entitled “’Who may in future undertake to write Father’s biography?’: The Emerson Family and Emerson’s Reputation” at the American Literature Association annual conference in Boston.

My work on this project has benefited from the generous support of Ball State's Office of Academic Research and Sponsored Programs, including most recently a Supplementary Assigned Time Grant for academic year 2003-2004, S.E.E.T. grants from 2004 through 2007, and a Summer Research Grant for 2005; a grant-in-aid from the American Antiquarian Society (2004) to attend its Summer Seminar in the History of the Book; and a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend (2004).

In addition to these three book projects, I am at the beginning stages of a monograph on American writers and literary tourism:

Writers in Residence: The Effect of Literary Tourism on Author Reputation

I am examining how authors' reputations are impacted when their lives and work are constructed by touristic needs, a phenomenon theorists call "sight framing." I will investigate and document this relationship and its effect on literary history at two "literary shrines": the South Berwick, Maine, home of the American novelist Sarah Orne Jewett (1849-1909) and Lamb House, Rye, England, the home of the transatlantic novelist Henry James (1843-1916). For each location I will gather and analyze archival evidence--letters, newspaper articles, photographs, tourist brochures, Chamber of Commerce records, souvenirs, guide scripts, and interviews--to document the effect of commerce and tourism on literary reputations.

August 2009