The Department of English and Comparative Literature is honored to celebrate our graduate students’ accomplishments in research and teaching. Graduate students are integral to the DOECL and the university community. To commemorate our exceptional students, the department gives annual graduate achievement awards to highlight the outstanding work of DOECL graduate students across fields and stages in the program.
Read about this year’s awardees below.
Rene Marzuk was awarded the Ruth Rose Richardson Award for an outstanding record in the first year of graduate study. Marzuk’s research interests are in literary instances of emergence and intertextual approaches that reveal the production of knowledge as a collective endeavor spanning times, cultures, and disciplines.
The Joseph Breen Award for outstanding work in the field of Medieval Studies went to Krista Telford. Telford researches forms of prayer in medieval and early modern literature, using an interdisciplinary approach that considers the performative aspect of many poems and prayers and draws on musicological research.
Lanier Walker was given the Howell-Voitle Award for outstanding work on a dissertation in the Early Modern Period. Walker’s dissertation examines the epistemological value of the documentary medium in Elizabethan and Jacobean England by asking how, when, and why early moderns decided to trust the documents they encountered. She argues that the vocabulary of documents offered playwrights and poets an invaluable framework with which to explore social, political, and spiritual uncertainties.
The Lee Green Award for outstanding work in race or ethnic studies was awarded to Victoria Valle, who specializes in Latina/o Studies, the digital humanities, and 19th/20th century Multi-Ethnic literature.
Angelique Bassard was awarded the Robert Bain Award for excellence achieved by a second-year student in pre-1900 American Literature or in Southern Literature. Bassard’s research is in American literature in the Long Nineteenth Century, with particular interest in Postbellum African American Literature, Southern Writers, Reconstruction, the memory and haunting of the slave past, and Southern realism and romanticism.
The C. Hugh Holman Award for a student with an outstanding record writing a dissertation in pre-1900 American Literature was given to Jordan Williamson. Williamson studies transatlantic literature of the Long Nineteenth Century and modernism.
Brendan Chambers got the Linda Wagner-Martin Award for a student with an outstanding record writing a dissertation in post-1900 American Literature. Chambers’ research focuses on phenomenology, exploring how writers across genres represent consciousness and perception in their writing.
Fred and Joan Thomson Award for outstanding work on a dissertation in 18th or 19th-century British Literature went to Katherine Stein. Stein studies figures of the child and children’s literature in the Victorian Era from an interdisciplinary and transhistorical approach reaching into the early twentieth century.
Jessica Ginocchio was awarded the Diane Leonard Teaching Award for outstanding foreign language teaching. Ginocchio teaches Russian and researches late 19th and early 20th-century Russian and German fiction, with special interests in the depictions of animals and death in literature.
The Graduate Essay Prize in Comparative Literature was given to Emily Singeisen. Singeisen’s research investigates the ways in which contemporary theory might enrich our reading of ancient literature.
Margaret Maurer earned the Dougald Macmillan Award for the outstanding dissertation in English. Maurer’s research focuses on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature and science, especially alchemy and chymistry.
The Eugene H. Falk Award for the outstanding dissertation in Comparative Literature was awarded to Chloe Hamer. Hamer’s research focuses on 20th-century Francophone Caribbean literature and memory studies.
Congratulations to all the Graduate Achievement awardees.
