Jerome John McGann (born July 22, 1937) is an American academic and 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 Philosophical Society and 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 Prize (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.[1]
McGann's first works of consequence were two books he published in 1983, The Romantic Ideology and A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism. Each defined the two large fields that have organized all his work, Romanticism (broadly conceived as an ongoing cultural enterprise) and Textual Studies. The Critique was the forecast of the work in Digital Humanities (DH) that he began undertaking in the early 1990s when he helped found the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH) at U. of Virginia, an initiative that probably had more influence than any other in shaping the course of Digital Humanities in the United States. Extrapolating the implications of his experimental editorial project The Rossetti Archive (1993–2008), McGann has published a large body of work -- it is ongoing -- on DH theory and method. Since the turn of the century that work became part of the broad argument he has developed for the pertinence of philological and historical method in literary and cultural studies. McGann has also written six books of poetry including Air Heart Sermons (1976) and Four Last Poems (1996), both published by Pasdeloup Press in Canada. He is also the founder of the Applied Research in Patacriticism digital laboratory, which includes such software projects as IVANHOE and NINES.
McGann has been married since 1960 (to Anne Lanni) and has three children (born 1963, 1965, 1967).