Grossman and Jelen Win Major Fellowships

Marshall Grossman has received a Folger NEH Long Term Fellowship, and Sheila Jelen has received a fellowship from the Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies.

New honors were recently announced for two members of the English Department:

Marshall Grossman, Professor of English, received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities for full-time residency at the Folger Shakespeare Library for academic year 2009-2010. Grossman will be writing and researching his new book project on Milton and rational religion, entitled, "Reason's Martyrs: Poetry and Belief in Paradise Regained, to which is added, Samson Agonistes."

"I am arguing that Milton's restoration poems reject religious enthusiasm in favor of arguments accessible to reason," says Grossman about his work-in-progress. "I suggest that Milton in this later period is better thought of less a figure from the end of the reformation than one from the beginning of the enlightenment."

Sheila Jelen, Associate Professor of English, won a fellowship at the Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan for fall 2009. Jelen's residency will be related to her current project on "Ethnographic Narratives: Fiction and Photography as Artifacts of Eastern European Jewry."