Havens Awarded Lindsay Young Professorship
Hilary Havens, associate professor in the UT Department of English and director of the Digital Humanities Interdisciplinary Program, has been awarded a Lindsay Young Professorship.
Havens’s research interests are the 18th century, digital humanities, the romantic period, and the novel. Her book, Revising the Eighteenth-Century Novel: Authorship from Manuscript to Print, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2019. It contends that 18th-century novels were influenced by a form of collaborative authorship rather than the individualistic view of Romantic period authorship, examining the work of Frances Burney, Jane Austen, Samuel Richardson, and Maria Edgeworth.
Havens is one of the editors of the Maria Edgeworth Letters Project, a digital database for the Irish Regency author Maria Edgeworth’s correspondence. The work is funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). She has been awarded multiple grants from the NEH, most recently the Humanities Collections and Reference Resources Implementation Grant as a co-principal investigator for 2025-2028.
While completing her PhD in English literature at McGill University, Havens studied Frances Burney, an 18th-century English women’s writer. Her edition of Frances Burney’s second novel Cecilia, published in 1782, is forthcoming in 2027 from Cambridge University Press.
Established in 1980 by Knoxville lawyer Lindsay Young, these endowed professorships reward faculty who are outstanding teachers, researchers, and public servants. Ten awards are made each year: one in law, one in veterinary medicine, and eight in the humanities. This professorship will support Havens as she continues her research on important Romantic novels, authors, and the European narrative.
by Sloan Docekal