In the past six months English department graduate and undergraduate students have harvested a legitimate bumper crop of fellowships, prizes, and grants. English Matters isn’t sure if this is a record season, but it certainly wouldn’t surprise us if it was. Two things, largely, have coalesced in making this fall’s graduate student grant news so very good: we have excellent students, and we have spectacular alumni! From the bottom of our hearts, we thank all alumni and donors who’ve found ways to support our department’s ambitious student-scholars. Your support is key in making studying English a viable choice for our ever-impressive cadre of whip-smart students. Please visit the English Department’s support page to explore ways you can lend (okay, okay give!) to the cause, and see your name “up in lights” (if you turn your screen’s brightness way up).
Without further ado, our Sponsored Fellowships and Prizes, most made possible by alumni – thank you!
Betty T. Johnson Fellowship--Chelsea Grimmer
David A. Robertson Fellowship--David Kumler and Alan Williams
Donna Gerstenberger Fellowship--Emily George and Jessica Holmes
Phyllis F. and Donald E. Dorset Fellowship--Bom Kim, Matthew Hitchman, Sumyat Thu, and Phillip Savage
Robert R. and Mary Waltz Fellowship--Navid Ebrahimzadeh
Susannah J. McMurphy Fellowship--Thaomi Michelle Dinh
Graduate School Presidential Dissertation Fellowship--Emily George
Joff Hanauer fellowship--Amanda M. McCourt
Padelford Endowed Fellowship--Brianna Martinez and Luis Resendez
Graduate Prizes
Heilman Dissertation Prize--Emily Bald and Zachary Tavlin
Hallien Johnson Memorial Prize in Women and Literary Study--Tyler Kipling
Hermione and Louis Brown Graduate Publication Prize--Chelsea Grimmer
Creative Writing Graduate Fellowships
Pollock Fellowship– Sarah Bitter, Boston Chandler, Dilara Elibir, and Rachel Hill
Ingham Fellowship– Allison Ang and Kym Littlefield
Pollock Professorship Fellowship – Rachel Hill
Loren D. Milliman Fellowship– Rachel Hill
Creative Writing Graduate Prizes
Nelson Bentley Prize (fiction)--Boston Chandler
Nelson Bentley Prize (poetry)--Michael Alexander Turner
Joan Byers Grayston Prize--Emma Aylor
David Guterson Prize--Piper Daugharty
Eugene Van Buren Prize for Fiction – Marianne Manzler and Piper Daugharty
Joyce Waddell Prize for Talented Writers--Sarah Bitter and Dilara Elbir
Undergraduate Scholarships
Eilert Anderson Scholarship –Izaiha Linton
Edward G. Cox Scholarship – Addie Augsburger
Gamma Phi Beta-Winnifred S. Hagget Scholarship – Cara Pangelinan
Robert B. Heilman Scholarship - Addie Augsburger
John Kimball Woolley Scholarship – Maxwell Eberle
Roger Sale Scholarship - Addie Augsburger
Peter L. Thorpe Scholarship – Micah Lusignan
Tia Val Spinoza Sullivan Scholarship – Aman Agarwal
Lucky Budd Waller Scholarship – Mickee CheungMcLennaghan Term Scholarship – Will St. Pierre Nelson and McKenzie Murray
Thomas Pickering Scholar: Marshall Sherrill
Libraries Student Employee Scholarship: Zoe Amery Handler
Creative Writing Undergraduate Scholarship
Edith K. Draham Scholarship--Sumaya Ali
Creative Writing Undergraduate Prizes
Grayston Prize--Julia Powers
Arthur Oberg Prize--Daniel O’Connell and Kendall Upton
Charlotte Paul Reese Prize--Riley Grace Borden
In other award, prize, and general excellence news:
Claire Barwise and Alex McCauley each received a one-quarter Modern Language Quarterly: A Journal of Literary History fellowship for the 2019-20 academic year. MLQ is a venerable institution at the University of Washington, having first gone to press in 1940.
Matthew Poland received a Chester Fritz International Research and Study Fellowship from the UW Graduate School for the 2019-20 academic year to fund one quarter of archival research in London.
Kaelie Giffel and Caitlin Postal have been awarded 2019-2020 Mellon Collaborative Grant Fellowships as part of the Simpson Center's initiative Reimagining the Humanities PhD and Reaching New Publics: Catalyzing Collaboration. This fellowship supports work in developing connections between UW and local community colleges.
Also administered by the Simpson Center, funding to organize a Graduate Research Cluster focused on Indigenous Studies has been awarded to Lydia Heberling. Matt Poland received Simpson Center funding to organize a Graduate Research Cluster focused on The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century. And Alexandra Meany received funding to organize a Graduate Research Cluster focused on Writing Racial Capitalism Across Disciplines.
Winner of the Joan Webber Award for 200-level teaching is Matthew Hitchman.
Dilara Elbir recently published her essay "Why films about lesbian characters should be called lesbian films" in Little White Lies (UK). Little White Lies is one of the leading publications on indie cinema and has been described as being “at the vanguard of the independent publishing movement.” Elbir is the co-founder and Editor-in-Chief of Much Ado About Cinema, a publication that works to cast new impressions on the traditionally white, male and heterosexual world of film criticism. She is a Pollock Fellow at UW and recipient of Joyce Waddell Prize for Talented Writers.
Rasheena Fountain recently published her essay, "Black Children and the School-to-Prison Pipeline" in Zora. Fountain was also featured on a radio program, Bird Note: Stories about Birds, the Environment and More, in which she talks about an educator who was one inspiration for her work in environmental science and the outdoors.
And finally, and, perhaps, most impressively, Ashley Beeman, one of our English undergrads (also majoring in French), has been named the College of Arts and Sciences Dean's Medalist for the Humanities. This award recognizes the most outstanding graduating senior in the Humanities Division. We thank Jeff Knight and Kimberlee Gillis-Bridges, who wrote letters of nomination, and to Nancy Sisko for coordinating the nomination process. Below we reprint Beeman’s award announcement from the College of Arts and Science. Way to go Ashley!
ASHLEY BEEMAN; DEAN’S MEDALIST IN THE HUMANITIES; BA, ENGLISH, FRENCH
Ashley Beeman loves books. That makes sense given her double major in English and French. But unlike many of her peers, Beeman is drawn to volumes that are centuries old. For both of her majors, she has undertaken research projects that involve rare books in UW Libraries’ Special Collections, dating back to the sixteenth century.
Given her interest in rare books, Beeman found the perfect campus job as a student, working in Special Collections. She also researched a collection of about 100 French books from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that had been donated to the Department of French & Italian Studies.
“In trying to figure out how to catalogue books so that we’d know what was in the small collection, I couldn’t think of a better person than Ashley to go through them, do some research into each, and write up a detailed, annotated bibliography,” says Geoffrey Turnovsky, associate professor of French. “She did a fantastic job and we are immensely grateful to her for this work, which has helped us understand this donation much better.”
It’s no surprise that Turnovsky chose Beeman for the research project. He describes her academic work as “remarkably advanced.” Jeffrey Knight, who had Beeman in two of his classes, is equally effusive. “Ashley is a student of the humanities in the truest and most undiluted sense,” says Knight, associate professor of English. “She doesn’t just take classes, she synthesizes them. She allows different disciplines and texts in different languages to reflect on each other and produce new insight.”
When not researching historical books or working in UW Special Collections, Beeman has focused on another of her interests: music. Her first year at the UW she played piccolo in the Husky Marching Band; for the remaining three years she performed flute and piccolo with the UW Symphonic Band.