Sandra Harbert Petrulionis has been named distinguished professor of English and American studies at Penn State Altoona. She is the first faculty member at the college to receive this honor.Petrulionis is the author of "To Set This World Right: The Antislavery Movement in Thoreau’s Concord," the editor of "Thoreau In His Own Time," and "Thoreau's Journal 8: 1854," and the co-editor of "The Oxford Handbook of Transcendentalism" and "More Day to Dawn: Thoreau’s Walden for the 21st Century." In addition, she has published on Herman Melville, Louisa May Alcott, and other American writers and reformers. She has received four grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the most recent two of which have provided more than half a million dollars in support of a scholarly, annotated, digital edition of the complete Almanacks of Mary Moody Emerson. The director of the NEH's Summer Institute on "Transcendentalism and Social Reform," she is also engaged in the research for a cultural biography of 19th-century activist, author and editor Thomas Wentworth Higginson.
Petrulionis was a Fulbright scholar in Germany and a recipient of several honors, including the George W. Atherton Award for Excellence in Teaching, the Kjell Meling Award for Distinction in the Arts and Humanities, and the college award for Outstanding Achievement in Research and Creative Activity.