English Department Faculty, Students Garner Honors and Awards
These days, I can barely keep up with the accolades being garnered by English Department faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates. Yesterday, we got the great good news that Prof. Judith Plotz is a winner of this year’s George Washington Award, one of the highest honors the University confers. I’ll blog more about Prof. Plotz, who is retiring this spring, in the weeks ahead. Here is a list of past GW Award recipients.
In other news, Ph.D. student Nedda Mehdizadeh, whom we recently featured here, won a fellowship to join the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) summer seminar, “Re-mapping the Renaissance: Exchange Between Early Modern Islam and Europe,” at the University of Maryland, College Park. As Prof. Gil Harris, Director of Graduate Studies, notes, “Nedda’s fellowship is an extraordinary accomplishment. It is all the more extraordinary in that there are only two places reserved for graduate students in the seminar, which brings together top scholars on relations between early modern Europe and Islam. There were an enormous number of applicants for the seminar; we are fortunate indeed that Nedda will be representing GW, and our graduate program, at it.”
Ph.D. student Dora Danylevich has also landed, with funding, a place in Cornell University’s summer School of Theory and Criticism. Admission to the STC seminars are highly competitive, as these are open to academics of all levels. Congratulations to Dora!
And Assistant Prof. Jonathan Hsy has won a prestigious NEH Summer Stipend. According to the NEH, “this year’s grant was highly competitive. We received 1,023 applications but, given available resources, were able to fund only 85 awards, so receiving this grant is indeed a significant achievement.” Indeed, by my calculation, only 8 percent of this year’s applicants won stipends. We know that GW is getting more selective, but the NEH is another league altogether! Prof. Hsy will use the Summer Stipend to work on his book-in-progress about merchants and literary production in medieval London.
We are so proud of all of these well deserved accomplishments. Please keep me posted if you have news to share.
