Jerome McGann (born July 22, 1937) is a textual scholar whose work focuses on the history of literature and culture from the late eighteenth-century to the present.
Educated at Le Moyne College (B.S. 1959), Syracuse University (M.A. 1962) and Yale University (Ph.D., 1966), McGann currently teaches at the University of Virginia (1986—present), where he arrived after leaving Caltech.
McGann is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has received honorary doctoral degrees from University of Chicago (1996) and University of Athens (2009). Other awards include: Melville Cane Award, American Poetry Society, 1973, for his work on Swinburne as "The Year's Best Critical Book about Poetry"; Distinguished Scholar Award from the Keats-Shelley Association of America (1989); Distinguished Scholar Award from the Byron Society of America, 1989; and the Wilbur Cross Medal, Yale University Graduate School, 1994.
In 2002 he was the recipient of three major awards: the Richard W. Lyman Award for Distinguished Contributions to Humanities Computing, National Humanities Center (first award recipient); the James Russell Lowell Award (from the Modern Language Association) for Radiant Textuality as the Most Distinguished Scholarly Book of the Year; and the Mellon Foundation Distinguished Achievement Award.
He has been a Fulbright Fellow (1965—66), an American Philosophical Society Fellow (1967) and Guggenheim Fellow (1970—71, 1976—77) and has been awarded NEH grants in 1975-76, 1987—89, 2003—2006, as well as grants from the Getty Foundation, the Delmas Foundation, and the Mellon Foundation. He has held more than a dozen other appointments, including President, Society for Textual Scholarship, 1995—1997; and President, Society for Critical Exchange, 2005-6. Since 1999 he has been a Senior Research Fellow, Institute of English Studies, University of London and since 2000 a Senior Research Fellow, University College, London.
McGann's most notable works were the two books published in 1983, The Romantic Ideology and A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism. McGann has also written four books of poetry including Air Heart Sermons (1976) and Four Last Poems (1996), both published by Pasdeloup Press in Canada. In 1993, McGann began his The Rossetti Archive (1993—2008). He is also the founder of the Applied Research in Patacriticism digital laboratory, which includes such software projects as IVANHOE and NINES.
Fiery Dust: Byron's Poetic Development. University of Chicago Press, 1969
Swinburne: An Experiment in Criticism. University of Chicago Press, 1972
The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation. University of Chicago Press, 1983
A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism. University of Chicago Press, 1983
The Beauty of Inflections: Literary Investigations in Historical Method and Theory. Clarendon Press, 1985
Social Values and Poetic Acts. Harvard U. Press, 1987
Towards a Literature of Knowledge. Oxford U. Press and U. of Chicago Press, 1989
The Textual Condition. Princeton U. Press, 1991
Black Riders: The Visible Language of Modernism. Princeton UP, 1993
Byron: The Complete Poetical Works, ed. with Introduction, Apparatus, and Commentaries. 7 Vols. Clarendon Press, The Oxford English Texts series, 1980—1993
Poetics of Sensibility. A Revolution in Literary Style. Oxford UP, 1996
Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Game that Must be Lost. Yale UP, 2000
Radiant Textuality. Literature Since the World Wide Web. Palgrave/St Martins, 2001
Byron and Romanticism. Cambridge University Press, 2002
Algernon Charles Swinburne. Major Poems and Selected Prose. Yale UP, 2004
The Scholar's Art. Literary Studies in a Managed World. U. of Chicago Press, 2006
The Point is to Change It. Poetry and Criticism in the Continuing Present. U. of Alabama Press, 2007
Stephen Crane's The Black Riders and other lines, ed. with Afterword. Rice UP, Literature by Design series, 2009
Byron's Manfred. Pasdeloup Press, 2009
Are the Humanities Inconsequent? An Interpretation of Marx's Riddle of the Dog. Prickly Paradigm Press, 2009
Online Humanities Scholarship. The Shape of Things to Come, ed. with an Introduction. Rice UP, 2010
