English Department Student Success

The English Department's graduate and undergraduate students have reeled off an impressive list of awards, prizes, and publications in 2016.  Congratulations to all!

Graduate: 

Nancy Bartley's script, The Boy Who Shot the Sheriff, based on her nonfiction book, was accepted into the Beverly Hill Film Festival and was the first-place winner in the Women in Cinema International Screenplay Competition. First place comes with $1,000.

Jane Wong has won the College of Arts and Sciences Graduate Medal in the Humanities. This prestigious award closes Dr. Wong's storied chapter here with us as a graduate student; in fall she takes a post as Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Western Washington University.

Laura DeVos, Denise Grollmus, Stephanie Hankinson , Hsinmei Lin, Samantha Simon each won an English Department Distinguished Researcher Award, given to those students nominated by the Graduate Studies Committee to be our nominees for college or graduate school fellowships.

Laura DeVos has been awarded an Elizabeth Kerr Macfarlane Endowed Scholarship for the 2017-2018 academic year.  This prestigious scholarship from the UW College of Arts and Sciences provides financial assistance to highly deserving students in the Humanities.

Hsinmei Lin has been selected for the Allan and Mary Kollar Endowed Fellowship for 2017-2018 academic year. The scholarship is designed to provide financial assistance to highly deserving full-time graduate students in the Humanities, particularly in American art history and American literature.

Patrick Milian and Zach Tavlin have been selected as 2017-2018 Graduate Fellows for the Joff Hanauer Endowment for Excellence in Western Civilization.  This fellowship recognizes work and research involving Western civilization.  It looks to “foster excellent work in the Western tradition and to help prepare teachers from different disciplines who have well-reasoned convictions about the place of Western civilization in the curriculum of an American liberal arts institution.”

Elizabeth Janssen and Stephanie Hankinson are finalists for the 2017 UW Excellence in Teaching Award. Janssen and Hankinson are being recognized by the UW’s Center for Teaching and Learning for their extraordinary effectiveness as teachers and ability to engage, innovate, and inspire.

Sara Lovett won the Richard J. Dunn First Year Teaching Award for her English 131 class.  Jacki Fiscus and Alex Smith are co-winners of the Joan Webber Award for Outstanding Teaching in the Writing Programs by a Graduate Student.  The English Department’s Expository Writing Committee annually confers these honors on English graduate students who’ve demonstrated excellence in the teaching of writing.

Krista Daniel and Sam Hushagen are co-winners of the Joan Webber Award for 200-level Teaching, awarded annually by our Undergraduate Education Committee.

Congratulations to Kelsey Fanning for winning $500 and the Johnson Prize for an outstanding Masters Essay on a topic related to women writers or intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality and/or nation.  Her essay, "Inclusion Without Equality: The Representational Politics of Academe's Discourse of Diversity," was directed by Professor Habiba Ibrahim.

Congratulations also to Sharmila Mukherjee, whose dissertation "Shakespeare and the Colonial Encounter in India in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries," co-directed by Professors Laura Chrisman and Bill Streitberger, is the winner of this year's Heilman Dissertation Prize.  She receives a $500 honorarium.

Erik Jaccard won the Louis and Hermione Brown Publication Prize for his essay, “Not Death, But Annihilation: Nineteen Eighty-Four the Catastrophe of Englishness.” The essay appears in Critical Insights: Nineteen Eighty-Four (Grey House Publishing, 2016).

Alan Williams has been accepted into the Stanford University coordinated Inter-university Center for Japanese Language Studies in Yokohama, Japan.  He'll be attending both this summer and in the 2017/18 academic year.

 

 

Undergraduate:

Tressa Thomas was selected as the 2017 Bonderman Fellow. These prestigious fellowships fund eight months of solo travel to two regions of the world.  The Bonderman fellowship is highly coveted and contested; winners display the capacity for vision and leadership as well as potential for humane and effective participation in the global community.

Kendall Horan, a Creative Writing focused English undergraduate, has been awarded a Thomas A. Lederman Endowed Scholarship for 2017-2018. 

Verónica Paulina Cedillo Hernandez was nominated to serve at UW’s graduation ceremony as Gonfaloniere for the English department. UW’s gonfalonieres are students who’ve demonstrated outstanding achievement.  Read Ms. Hernandez's gonfaloniere bio in UW Today.