May 21, 2025
NATCHITOCHES – Dr. Nicole Lobdell, assistant professor of English in the Louisiana Scholars’ College at Northwestern State University, was awarded a summer stipend from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
“With my NEH summer stipend, I plan to visit five archives and libraries to read, examine and photograph copies of Shelley and Mary (1882), a proto-biography of [English writer] Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein, compiled by her daughter-in-law Jane Shelley,” Lobdell said. “There are approximately 20 copies of this book in existence today, but what makes these books even more interesting is that each copy is different in some way. So far, I’ve seen seven copies of Shelley and Mary in both the U.S. and the U.K., and with my stipend, I will be able to see several more copies along with relevant letters and documents connected to Mary Shelley and these copies.”
Lobdell joined the Louisiana Scholars’ College in 2022. She is originally from Atlanta, Georgia, and holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Georgia. She teaches a variety of courses on Gothic and Horror literature, science fiction, women writers and literature and medicine. She is the author of “X-RAY,” published by Bloomsbury last year, which looks at the influence of X-rays on popular culture from books and movies to art and music.
“I will conduct my research this summer at American University in Washington, D.C., the University of Pennsylvania and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, the New York Public Library and the Beinecke Library at Yale University,” she said. “This research will be part of my larger book project, Stranger than Fiction: The First Biography of Mary Shelley, which studies how the Shelley and Mary volumes were compiled, published and edited, and what roles they had in shaping our ideas and beliefs about Mary Shelley’s life and writing today.”
Last summer, Lobdell was selected for a summer fellowship at the University of Oxford, England, where she researched early biographies on the life of Mary Shelley to advance development of the project.
The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) has for many years had a summer stipend program, which provides a two-month stipend of $8,000 for humanities faculty to work full-time on research and/or writing scholarly articles and books for publication. Lobdell’s award is one of 18 in the nation and the only one for the state of Louisiana.
“The summer stipend is a very competitive award because it grants faculty so much freedom to pursue their research and writing,” Lobdell said. “Each university can nominate only one faculty member for the award, and the applications are reviewed through several rounds of judgement by experts in the applicant’s research field.
“I have applied for the NEH summer stipend two times previously, including last year, so I’m very grateful that my application was successful at last,” Lobdell said. “It’s hard to overstate the impact of an award like this one. To have my research both validated and supported by the NEH and by experts in my field is a tremendous honor, and I am grateful for the chance to spend these next two months pursuing my research and seeing what new things I can discover.”
For more information on Lobdell’s work, go to nicolelobdell.com.
Information on the Louisiana Scholars’ College, Louisiana’s selective-admission honors college of the liberal arts and sciences, is available at https://www.nsula.edu/scholars/.
