MLA Distinguished Scholar of Early American Literature, 2006: Frank Shuffelton

No one in Early American Studies has embodied the intellectual transit of the past three decades from Puritan Studies to the exploration of the transatlantic eighteenth century as forcefully as Frank Shuffelton. A learned intellectual historian, a diligent bibliographer, a critical expositor of Enlightenment ideology, an industrious textual editor, and a good citizen of the institutional world of scholarship, Frank Shuffelton has in the 30 years since the publication of his study of the Puritan divine, Thomas Hooker, 1586-1647, been a central participant in the conversation that has transformed the field. He was an undergraduate at Harvard University when Perry Miller stepped away from the lectern and breathed his last. The student drank deep the icy draught of Puritan divinity, and at Stanford University, where he took his Ph.D., perfected his understanding of Thomas Hooker, the founder of Hartford, Connecticut, and author of Anglo-America's first written constitution, the "Fundamental Orders of Connecticut." He would in the course of time write about Roger Williams, Ann Bradstreet, and New English conception of Native Americans. After delivering what would become the standard study of Hooker, Shuffelton did what few sons of Harvard dared to do, abandon the secure ordinances of a Puritan-grounded American civil religion and venture into terra incognita, the writings of British Americans from regions south of Connecticut. He published landmark essays in Early American Literature on William Livingston's "Philosophical Solitude" and Thomas Godfrey, Jr.'s tragedy "The Prince of Parthia"—among the very first studies in the major recovery of British American letters that took place in the late 1970s and early 1980s. When his attention turned in the direction of New England, Horatio Alger, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller's student Evelina Metcalf, and Hannah Webster Foster absorbed his study. But his enduring fascination became Thomas Jefferson. Shuffelton's turn toward Jefferson in the early 1980s was accompanied by a turn to critical theory in his thought. His immersion in Jefferson scholarship and the burgeoning literature treating the ideological legacies of Enlightenment while preparing his Thomas Jefferson: A Comprehensive Annotated Bibliography of Writings About Him, 1826-1980 and Thomas Jefferson, 1981-1990: A Comprehensive Critical Bibliography transformed his own approach to early American materials; he became an intellectual historian of discourse, gender, and ethnicity. Shuffelton's emergence as a central critical voice in retheorizing early American letters took place in 1990 in a series of landmark articles: "The Discourse of Modernism in the Age of Jefferson." Prospects 15 (1990); "In Different Voices: Gender in the American Republic of Letters," Early American Literature 25 (1990); "From Jefferson to Thoreau: The Possibilities of Discourse," Arizona Quarterly 46 (1990); and "Privation and Fulfillment: The Ordering of Early New England: A Review Essay," Early American Literature 25 (1990). In 1993, he edited two important essay collections, A Mixed Race: Ethnicity in Early America (Oxford University Press) and The American Enlightenment (University of Rochester Press).

Since that time Frank Shuffelton has been preparing his summary reflection on the cultural significance of Thomas Jefferson, providing glimpses of what is to come in a series of articles on Jefferson. Never content to restrict his investigations to just one subject, Shuffelton has also taken up other matters—the career of Phillis Wheatley, the judgments expected of C. B. Brown's reader, and the poetics of British American science. This rich wealth of inquiry has been married to three decades of service to his university and his profession, sitting on the boards of journals, the governing boards of societies, the advisory boards of foundations, and chairing the English Department at the University of Rochester.

For his contributions as a scholar of Puritanism, as an intellectual historian of the American Enlightenment, as a literary historian of British America and the American Renaissance, as a critic of early American culture, as a bibliographer of Thomas Jefferson, and as a theorist of transatlantic republic of letters, the MLA Division of American Literature to 1800 designates Frank Shuffelton DISTINGUISHED SCHOLAR OF EARLY AMERICAN LITERATURE, December 2006.