Honors and Awards

Honors Day awards recognize the excellent work of our undergraduate and graduate students within the department, as well as the superb teaching by our faculty and teaching assistants. This year, Honors Day was combined with our departmental graduation ceremony. Both of these events serve to acknowledge the outstanding achievements of our student body.

Faculty Awards and Recognitions

Martha Munn Bedingfield Excellence in Teaching Award

Christopher Pizzino

External Awards

Beth Tobin: J.W. Woodruff, Sr. Faculty Fellow for the Woodruff Center for the Natural History of Georgia

Magdalena Zurawski: Norma Farber First Book Award from Poetry Society of America

University Awards

Cody Marrs: Michael F. Adams Early-Career Scholarship Award

Ed Pavlic: Distinguished Research Professor

Ed Pavlic: Albert Christ-Janer Creative Research Award

Cynthia Turner Camp: inaugural cohort of the UGA Special Collections Libraries Fellows

Spenser Simrill: inaugural cohort of the UGA Special Collections Libraries Fellows

Undergraduate Student Awards

Undergraduate Scholarship Awards

Joshua Brown Scholarship

Camile Jones

Runner-Up: Chelsea Larson

Virginia Rucker Walter Scholarship

Camily Williams

Runner-Up: Tynan Stewart

H. Grady Hutcherson Memorial Georgia Access Scholarship Recipients

Mary Hellen Callier; Brittany Weeks; Annelise Halliday Norman; Anna Rowland

Upper Division Essay/Project Awards

Digital Humanities Prize

Emily Schoone, “The Human Crisis: Another Digital Story”

For an Essay Using Primary Sources

Tynan Stewart, “A Breakdown of Interpretation: Linguistic and Corporal Conflicts between the Wife of Bath and the Pardoner in The Canterbury Tales”

For an Essay Using Secondary Sources

Jorden Wade, “Whitman’s Farewell: An Examination of Second Annex: Good-Bye My Fancy”

Virginia Rucker Walter Poetry Award

Abby Spasser, “Lake Hillier”

From the judge, Heidi Lynn Staples: "If Gertrude Stein is right when she says that ‘adjectives are the hinges of being,’ then ‘Lake Hillier’ repeatedly unhinges and rehinges our beings, doing the important work of poetic language – opening us that we might dwell more fully. Phrases like the ‘bashful water,’ ‘Earth's prettiest healed scab,’ and lines like ‘I wonder if I'm pink,’ and ‘I am a happy berry seed lodged between your two favorite teeth,’ as well as the adjectival reversal in the closing – ‘as if I were walking / through honey, if honey / weren't sweet,’ reveal a mind alive to and active in the moment of world making. While in these examples, we hear the burbling brook – such music!"

First Year Composition Awards

Donald E. Barnett Awards

ENGL 1101: Sujith Vadlamudi, "Miss Anachronism"

ENGL 1102: Farrah Agha, "Sexism in ‘The Free Radio’”

Michael G. Moran e-Portfolio Awards:

ENGL 1101: John Henline

ENGL 1101 Honorable mentions: MacKenzie Stewart and Joo Hyun Yeom

ENGL 1102: Akilah Alexander and Andrea Morrison

Graduate Student Awards

Alice C. Langdale Award (for exceptional English graduate student)

Alexandra Edwards

Robert H. West Award (for outstanding graduate student in Creative Writing)

Matthew Nye

Robert H. West Award (for outstanding graduate student in Literary Criticism)

Dorothy Todd

Robert E. Park Essay Award

Amy Bonnaffons, “Bodies of Text: On the Lyric Essay”

James B. Colvert English Graduate Award (supports an advanced graduate student's research)

Sidonia Serafini

Summer Doctoral Research Fellowship

Maria Chappell

Mary Lynn Oliver Hunt and Matthew Alan Hunt Graduate Studies Fellowship in English

Holly Gallagher

Excellence in Graduate Research Award

Lindsey Harding

Graduate School Dean’s Award

Alexandra Edwards

Sarah Harrell

Graduating Masters and Doctoral Students

Daniel Citro, PhD

Major Professor: Jed Rasula

Dissertation: “Ropes, or, The Law”

Margaret Colvett, MA

Major Professor: Susan Rosenbaum

Thesis: “The Public Sings Himself: The Life and Work of Welborn Victor Jenkins”

Will Dunlap, PhD

Major Professor: Cody Marrs

Dissertation: “Bounty: a Novel”

Jonathan Foggin, PhD

Major Professor: Cynthia Turner Camp

Dissertation: “Pastors and Pilgrims: Augustinian Reform in the Medieval English Church”

Elizabeth Ashley Gardner, MA

Major Professor: John Lowe

Thesis: “Narrow Vision, Short Life: The Doomed Perspective of Edna Pontellier”

Katie Grubbs, PhD

Major Professor: Christie Desmet

Dissertation: “‘This Inheritance of Dust’: The Problem of Child Elegy”

Benjamin Hudson, PhD, MA

Major Professor: Tricia Lootens

Dissertation: “Exquisite Amateurs: Queer Dilettantism in Victorian Letters”

Kameel Mir, MA

Major Professor: Ed Pavlic

Thesis: “To Hurt Is to Shimmer: Violence in Literary Representations of Passing”

John Rodriguez, MA

Major Professor: Michelle Ballif

Thesis: “‘Philosophy of the Disembodied’: Towards an Affective Theory of Dialogue through Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me”

Kaitlyn Smith, MA

Major Professor: Hugh Ruppersburg

Thesis: “‘Now You Are Aware of Me!: The Spatial Authority of William Faulkner’s Women”

Michael Weaver, MA