PhD candidates Hannah Doherty and James Wood have received the Fliegelman Archival Research Awards for 2010.
Hannah will use the award to travel to the New York Public Library to study the materials available in the Pforzheimer and Berg Collections and then on to Harvard's Houghton Library to read specifically an 1808 novel The English-Woman and to look at generally collections on other Minerva authors - research for her dissertation-in-progress "The Myth of Minerva: Publishing, Popular Fiction and Romanticism, 1790-1820".
James too will travel to the Houghton Library to consult the Donald and Mary Hyde Collection of material relating to Samuel Johnson in preparation for the fifth and final chapter of his dissertation-in-progress "Anecdote and Enlightenment, 1700-1800".
Congratulations to both Hannah and James!
Congratulations to Jillian Hess who was the first-place winner of the Keats-Shelley Essay Prize in 2009. Jillian's essay “This Living Hand: Commonplacing Keats” is to be published in Keats-Shelley Review 2010, issue No 23.
Initially the brain-child of Caroline Wu and the late Quentin Crewe, The Keats-Shelley Prize was inaugurated in 1998 to reward excellence in writing on Romantic themes. The underlying purpose of the Prize was and remains to encourage people of all ages, but particularly the young, to respond personally to the emotions aroused in them by the work of the Romantics through rising to the challenge of writing their own poem or essay. Entries are invited annually in two categories: poems, on a theme chosen by the judges, and essays on any aspect of the work or life of Keats or Shelley.
The judges' panel consists of two practising poets, Matthew Sweeney, who is also a KSMA Trustee, and John Hartley Williams, and of two Romantic scholars who assess the essays. A distinguished literary figure with an interest in the Romantics is chosen as Prize Chairman each year. There are £3,000 of prizes, awarded in each category to a winner and a runner-up. The winners have the additional bonus of being published in the Keats-Shelley Review.
An Awards Ceremony takes place each year in London, to which all Friends and Competition entrants are invited. Former Prize Chairmen have included the poets and biographers Andrew Motion, Claire Tomalin, Tom Paulin, Grevel Lindop, Miranda Seymour, Ian Gilmour, James Fenton, Stephen Fry, Jonathan Keates, A.N.Wilson and Ann Wroe.
The Prize was sponsored for its first four years by The Folio Society, and thereafter by the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation and the John S.Cohen Foundation. It was sponsored in 2007 by Barclays Wealth, The Department of English, University of St Andrews, and The Cowley Foundation.
Congratulations to 4th-year PhD student, Elda Maria Roman, who was recently announced the winner of the Ernesto Galarza Prize for Excellence in Graduate Student Research. Elda Maria received a plaque and a check for $500 for the paper she submitted entitled "Putting the Go in Gomez: The Movement Towards Wider Class Diversity in Chicana/o Popular Culture".
This annual prize was initiated in 1986 to pay tribute to the pioneering scholarly work published by Dr. Ernesto Galarza, a Stanford alumnus who is generally regarded as the Dean of Chicano Studies. Through his research and activism on behalf of Chicanas/os that spanned five decades, Dr. Galarza inspired others to write about the condition of Latina/o people in the U.S. and his example inspired others to follow in his footsteps to promote social justice and equality. The Galarza Prizes are awarded to Stanford undergraduates and graduate students whose research reflects the spirit of Dr. Galarza.
Congratulations to current PhD student, Lee Konstantinou, who has just had his first novel published. Pop Apocalypse: A Possible Satire is a political satire about celebrity, pop culture, and the End of the World. It was recently published by Ecco/Harper Perennial.
This playful and witty novel takes our celebrity-obsessed and media-hijacked culture, mixes in geopolitics and a dash of cyberpunk dystopia to create an intelligent and blistering what-if.
–Publishers Weekly
Abusing the future to make hash of the present, Lee Konstantinou has fashioned one hell of a satire, one hell of a world. The writing is stunning, every sentence so packed with knowledge and wit that one’s laughter can barely catch up with the story. Konstantinou has shown us the future, and it doesn’t work. But this novel sure does.
–Roger Rosenblatt, author of Lapham Rising and Beet
“There’s a good deal of rattle and a certain amount of hum in this novel; rattle in the hailstorm of cool ideas, plot twists and one liners… [A] mighty impressive debut: I’m envious. In a good way.”
–Adam Roberts, author of On and Yellow Blue Tibia
Randy Johnson, Ryan Zurowski, Garth Kimbrell and Bridget Whearty , graduate students in Professor Stephen Orgel's "History of the Book" seminar compare the group's newly published editions of the Book of Sports and Sundry Horrible Conspiracies with copies of the originals in the Special Collections Room of the Green Library.
Emily Wilkinson has been announced as the winner of VQR's Young Reviewers Contest for her review of “The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective” by Kate Summerscale. Emily's review will be published in the Winter 2009 issue of VQR. In addition, she will receive $1,000.00 and a contract for additional reviews worth up to $3,000.00.