Hoffman Prize Given to Crowley and Other New Awards for Graduate Students

It gives us great pleasure to announce that Ph.D. candidate Tim Crowley has just won the 2007 “Calvin & Rose G. Hoffman Prize for a Distinguished Essay on Christopher Marlowe.”

 This award, administered through Marlowe's alma mater, the King’s School, Canterbury, is well known and valued in Renaissance studies.  Tim’s prize-winning essay is entitled, “Arms and the Boy: Marlowe’s Aeneas and the Parody of Imitation in Dido, Queen of Carthage.”  The essay will appear in one of the leading Renaissance journals, English Literary Renaissance, in fall 2008 (38:3). Tim’s award-winning essay began as a seminar paper for Professor Ted Leinwand.

Worth noting, the Hoffman Prize typically has been won by senior scholars, so that Tim may be the very first Ph.D. candidate ever to win it. And, also unusual, he is the second member of the Maryland English Department to win the award. Congratulations to Tim!  And thanks and congratulations to Professor Leinwand for superb mentorship!

We're very pleased to announce that doctoral candidate Kelly Wisecup has been awarded a Center for Teaching Excellence Teaching Assistant Development Grant. The grant is for the project titled "Developing English Department TAs through Teaching Resource Archives and Exchanges."  Congratulations to Kelly on this grant, and much appreciation for her efforts on behalf of our Teaching Assistants!

We're very pleased to announce that two of our doctoral students have won ARHU Graduate Student Travel Awards in this inaugural year of their offering. These awards are designed to support the scholarly and professional development of graduate students in the college.  With grateful acknowledgement of Dean Harris's efforts to support graduate education in this way, and with equal appreciation for our generous chair's commitment of matching departmental funds, please join me in congratulating Katherine Singer and Kathleen Barker on these awards.

Kathleen ("Kate") Barker will be using this support to defray expenses related to her participation in the 43rd International Congress on Medieval Studies, which will take place in May 2008 in Kalamazoo, Michigan.  She will be presenting "Bale's King Johan and Antichrist," a paper drawn from her dissertation research. 

Katherine ("Kate") Singer will use the support of the Graduate Student Travel Award to help meet expenses related to her participation in the "(Trans)national Identities/Reimagining Communities" conference, an event co-sponsored by the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism and the Centro Interdisciplinare di Studi Romantici, and scheduled to be held in Bologna, Italy, in March 2008.  Kate will be presenting an essay titled "Beachy Head's Hermit and the Enlightenment-to-Come," which is drawn from her dissertation research.