Modern Language Association Honored Scholar of Early American Literature, 2008: Philip F. Gura

The Division of American Literature to 1800 is charged to recognize on rare occasions the extraordinary contributions of scholars to early American studies. In 2008, we honor the work of Philip F. Gura.

Earlier this year, when I learned that the MLA Division of American Literature to 1800 would be honoring Philip F. Gura with its Distinguished Scholar Award, the news at first seemed entirely fitting but also oddly premature and even misplaced—at least to the uninitiated. Ordinarily, one would expect that a major award of this kind might be delivered with a kind of backward view: into the hands of a scholar who, just on the verge of retirement, receives the honor at the conclusion of a long career after having contributed brilliantly to the profession. But instead, this year's award honors a perennially resourceful and productive researcher whose energies show no signs of flagging, who even now is preparing yet another new book for publication, this latest volume a history of the American Antiquarian Society, the learned society whose resources have been so vital to his own research over the decades. The remarkable scholarly productivity that we honor with this award shows no signs of abating, and we are fortunate that the intellectual curiosity that lies behind the scholarship shows no signs of waning in its broad reach and grasp. So often does our profession reward specialization and focus that one also might have expected that any scholar so honored by the MLA would have spent an entire career looking rather narrowly albeit with discernment into issues related only to specialized areas in early American literature. With this award, however, we are privileged to honor a rara avis: a keen student and master scholar of early American culture whose breadth of knowledge and scholarly imagination have brought him fruitfully into contact with a range of interdisciplinary concerns across not only the early American canon but also into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Those of us who know Philip Gura are well acquainted with the personal and intellectual qualities that have undergirded his immense and ongoing contributions to American studies. Scrupulous attention to historical detail, vast erudition, and graceful writing are all hallmarks of his many books, essays, and reviews. Above all, though, are the boundless curiosity, imagination, and zest for research that have led him to follow some extraordinarily good instincts about what in fact is worth studying in the first place. As it happens, he discovered within the American archive an enormous range of topics for historical analysis, many of which he pursued with vigor and great success, although there is room here to mention only the most prominent of these. Philip would often point out to his students that none of his academic degrees was in the area of English or literature; undeterred by disciplinary boundaries, he nevertheless proceeded early in his career to produce The Wisdom of Words (1981), an important study of nineteenth-century American Renaissance writers and their relationship to scriptural authority. Only a few years later, A Glimpse of Sion's Glory (1984) substantially updated the pioneering work of Perry Miller on the New England religious mind by illuminating radical dimensions of colonial American religion. As a very young man, Philip Gura had already become a preeminent scholar of early American religion and culture.

Not long after making these first major contributions to early American historical scholarship, along with professional acclaim that led to a new beginning for his career at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Philip began a fruitful decade as editor of the journal Early American Literature. During these years, though, Philip's work took the kind of unexpected intellectual turn that few of us enrolled in his UNC graduate seminars would have expected. He had long been a student and player of traditional American music and musical instruments, and his immersion in early American religion and intellectual history gave way, at least temporarily, to research that would lead to the publication of two spectacular illustrated volumes—America's Instrument: The Banjo in the Nineteenth...