Department of English graduate student Felicity Sheehy has been named a 2024-25 artist in residence at the UMass Amherst Arthur F. Kinney Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies.

Sheehy writes, “I’ve devised a project that marries my creative and critical interests: I’ll be re-imagining the calendar poem. I’ll go on a research trip, and then lead a workshop / reading for UMass Amherst students and faculty in the spring.”

In their award letter, the committee noted that they were struck by the potential questions that Sheehy's calendar poem series raises around past and present.

“We look forward to seeing how your work will foster conversation around how the early moderns imagined the seasons (as they navigated their own climate crisis of the Little Ice Age) and the histories, memories, and stories that inform our current understanding ‘natural’ processes and cycles,” wrote Kinney Center Arts & Academic Programs Coordinator Liz Fox and Director Marjorie Rubright. 

Kinney Center artist residencies can range from one week to several months. The center, founded in 1998 and set amid gardens and meadowscape, holds a collection of over 1,000 rare books and manuscripts. The artist in residence explores the ways in which their work intersects with Renaissance (1490-1750) thought and craft to produce work that generates new perspectives on the relationship between the early modern world and our own.

The residency will “certainly” help Sheehy’s dissertation develop, notes Nigel Smith, the William and Annie S. Paton Foundation Professor of Ancient and Modern Literature at Princeton. Currently, Smith writes, Sheehy “is producing an exciting first chapter that resurrects the reputation of the once much read ‘calendar’ poet Thomas Tusser.”