Dodds wins Best Article Award for work on women and gender in early women’s writings
Lara A. Dodds
Mississippi State University English Professor Lara A. Dodds received the 2021 Best Article Award from the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and Gender for her paper highlighting the lack of women’s inclusion in early literary history. She garnered a membership into the SSEMWG as part of the award.
Dodds and her co-author Michelle M. Dowd, a professor of English at the University of Alabama and director of the Hudson Strode Program in Renaissance Studies, published “Happy Accidents: Critical Belatedness, Feminist Formalism, and Early Modern Women’s Writing” in 2020 in the journal, Criticism.
Exploring the academic context for the study of early modern women’s writing -- works written before 1800 -- Dodds’ paper argues that literary history is incomplete without full integration of research about these women’s works, and spotlights two specific examples raised by the works of Elizabeth Cary, a dramatist, and Hester Pulter, a poet.
“The award validates my work by highlighting the ongoing significance of feminist investigation of women’s literary creativity,” Dodds said. “In this article, we propose a methodology for more successful integration of women’s writing into literary history that can be enacted by scholars of English literature more broadly.”
Dan Punday, professor and head of the English department, said Dodds’ work continues to represent “the cutting edge” of feminist scholarship in early modern studies.
“She is reevaluating this literature’s relationship to its cultural and political moment -- especially by emphasizing work that has been marginalized by the field,” Punday said. “Academic publication itself has an extremely low acceptance rate; the journal where this was published -- Criticism -- has an acceptance rate of 8%. SSEMWG chose from among all the hundreds of articles published in 2020 to select this one piece by Professors Dodds and Dowd for recognition. That’s an amazing accomplishment.”
Referring to the paper as a “call-to-arms,” the awards committee noted Dodds’ and Dowd’s paper “offers sobering and instructive insights for humanist researchers of all disciplines, and it will be kindling for ardent and invigorating conversations throughout academia.”
An Indiana native, Dodds joined MSU’s faculty in 2004. She earned her Ph.D. and master’s degree from Brown University and her bachelor’s degree from DePauw University. At MSU, Dodds specializes in seventeenth-century literature, with a particular focus on Milton and on early modern women’s writing.
Part of MSU’s College of Arts and Sciences, the Department of English is available at www.english.msstate.edu.
MSU is Mississippi’s leading university, available online at www.msstate.edu.
Sarah Nicholas | College of Arts and Sciences
