Modern Language Association Honored Scholar of Early American Literature, 2009: David S. Shields

The Division of American Literature to 1800 is charged to recognize on rare occasions the extraordinary contributions of scholars to early American studies. In 2009, we honor the work of David S. Shields.

During the last twenty years or so, David S. Shields has been at the helm of early American literary studies at a time when our field has seen a period of remarkable vitality, vibrancy, change, and expansion. As a researcher, writer, editor, teacher, colleague, mentor, and administrative executive, David has been one of the field’s most important sources of both vision and energy, inspiring the rest of us with his boundless intellectual curiosity, creative entrepreneurship, and imagination, as well as his passion for knowledge, collegial generosity, and characteristically independent spirit. It is therefore most appropriate that the MLA Division of American Literature before 1800 should bestow the lifetime achievement award for 2009 on David S. Shields.

The publication of David’s first book, Oracles of Empire: Poetry, Politics, and Commerce in British America, 1690–1750 (U of Chicago P, 1990), was a true watershed moment in the history of early American literary studies. By placing early American poetry into the context of the economic politics of the British Empire during the eighteenth century, it not only helped expand the early American canon beyond the geographical boundaries of the future United States to include all of the Atlantic Anglophone and (later) the multilingual, circumatlantic, and hemispheric literary cultures of the New World, but it also grounded early American literary history on the firm footing of contemporary political, economic, social, and cultural history. His memorable contributions to such influential collaborative works as The Cambridge History of American Literature (ed. Sacvan Bercovitch, 1994), as well as scores of important articles published during the 1990s on early American literary and cultural history, solidified his status as one of the most important emerging scholars of early America. The crowning achievement of that decade, however, was the publication—in 1997— of his acclaimed and important Civil Tongues and Polite Letters in British America (Omohundro Institute for Early American History and Culture for U of North Carolina P). A cultural history of early American belles lettres in the context of a now lost world of eighteenth-century “polite” sociability—private societies, salons, clubs, coffeehouses, tavern companies, tea tables, balls, and ritual assemblies—Civil Tongues both built upon and moved beyond the cultural history of early American letters of much of the 1990s by reconstructing a “beau monde” that synthesized and drew upon the cultural values of not only an emerging bourgeois “public sphere” but also a vanishing courtly world of gentility.

Two years later, in 1999, David assumed the editorship of Early American Literature and continued to shape the direction of our field through its flagship journal for almost a decade. Among his many contributions as editor of Early American Literature, perhaps the most significant is his expansion of the journal’s profile to include literatures in languages other than English. In addition, he collaborated in a number of influential publications, including The History of the Book in America (ed. David Hall, Cambridge UP, 2000), edited various collections of essays, including Finding Colonial Americas: Essays in Honor of J. A. Leo Lemay (with Carla Mulford, U of Delaware P, 2001) and Liberty! Égalité! ¡Independencia! Print Culture, Enlightenment, and Revolution in the Americas, 1776–1838 (with Caroline Sloat et al, American Antiquarian Society and Oak Knoll, 2007). He also was a catalyzing force in numerous seminal initiatives and conferences, including the First Biennial Conference of the Society of Early Americanists (Charleston, SC, 1999), the First Early Ibero-Anglo Americanist Summit (Tucson, AZ, 2002), and Liberty! Égalité! ¡Independencia: Print Culture, Enlightenment, and Revolution in the Americas, 1776–1824 (American Antiquarian Society, 2006).

In 2003, David moved from the Citadel, where he had spent nearly twenty years, to the University of South Carolina, assuming a chair as the McClintock Professor of Southern Letters, an interdisciplinary position appropriately combining appointments in literary studies and history. In 2007 his new position was complimented by his appointment as the [End...