Sharon Harris, Ph.D.

Faculty Excellence in Research (Humanities/Social Sciences), 2009

Department of English
College of Liberal Arts & Sciences

Nominated By: Lynn Z. Bloom

Sharon is a professor of English and the author or editor of ten books, including critical studies such as Executing Race: Early American Women's Narratives of Race, Class, and Society (2005); collections of critical essays, including Periodical Literature of Eighteenth-Century America (2005); and scholarly editions, including Writing Cultural Autobiography: Rebecca Harding Davis's Autobiographical Narratives. She is also Series Editor for the University of Nebraska Press's Legacies of Nineteenth-Century U.S. Women's Writings. In addition, Professor Harris was a founding officer of the Society of Early Americanists (1992-1999) and founding President of the Society for the Study of American Women Writers (1998-2003). In 2005, Professor Harris was awarded a National Endowment of the Humanities Fellowship. Professor Harris currently has several projects in progress: a biography of Dr. Mary Walker, a collection of Walker's writings, The Selected Letters of Mercy Otis Warren (forthcoming 2008), A Biographical Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century U.S. Women Physicians (forthcoming 2010), an anthology of international feminist writings from Sappho to the present, and a collection of the writings of Ann Eliza Bleecker and her daughter Margaretta Bleecker Faugeres. She is also in the process of developing a website for primary texts by American women writers from the beginnings to 1850, with a section devoted to Connecticut women writers. She is the recipient of the 2007-2008 UConn Humanities Institute Fellowship.

"In the twenty years since Dr. Harris earned her PHD, her research accomplishments have been remarkable, sufficient to promote her quickly to the highest ranks of literacy scholars. She has seventeen books and some thirty articles and book chapters to her credit, an astonishing record of productivity in the labor-intensive field of eighteenth and nineteenth century American literature on which much of her work focuses. Indeed, it was her outstanding research record and its implications for both scholarship and teaching that led UConn to recruit and hire Dr. Harris." – Lynn Bloom, UConn Board of Trustee Distinguished Professor