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Department of Literatures in English Announces Student Award Winners

The Department of Literatures in English is host to many gifted student writers and teachers. Thanks to the generosity of various donors, annual prizes are awarded for outstanding work in poetry, fiction, research, critical writing, and instruction. We are pleased to announce our 2021 - 2022 student award winners.

Klarman Hall

Victoria Corwin

Victoria Corwin

/victoria-corwin
Michael Lee

Student Spotlight: Michael Lee

"As a poet with the heart of a historian, I’m interested in attending to the interrelated histories of European colonialism and industrial warfare through the lyric."

Klarman Hall

Mary Jacobus

Mary Jacobus was a Fellow of ady Margaret Hall, Oxford University, from 1971 to 1980. In 1980 she moved to Cornell University, where she held the John Wendell Anderson Chair of English and Women¹s Studies. In 2000 she returned to the UK as Grace 2 Professor of English at the University of Cambridge, where she was also a Professorial Fellow of Churchill College. From 2006 until her retirement, she was Director of Cambridge's Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH). In 2011-12, she returned to Cornell as M. H. Abrams Distinguished Visiting Professor. She has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the NEH, and the AHRC, and is an Honorary Fellow of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. She served on the Academic Committee of Norway's Holberg International Memorial Prize 2009-2015. She has written widely on Romanticism, feminism, and psychoanalysis, as well as visual culture; her most recent books includeThe Poetics of Psychoanalysis: In the Wake of Klein,Romantic Things: A Tree, a Rock, a Cloud, Reading Cy Twombly: Poetry in Paint (2016), and On Belonging and Not Belonging: Translation, Migration, Displacement (2022). She is currently working on a book on forests.

/mary-jacobus
Klarman Hall

Molly Hite

Molly Hite has written two novels and two critical studies of post-1945 experimental fiction. Her scholarly projects deal with Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group. She has taught classes on modernism, postmodern, experimental novels by women and Cornell writers.

/molly-hite
Klarman Hall

Lamar Herrin

Lamar Herrin is the author of five novels, includingThe Lies Boy Tellthat became a 1994 made-for-television drama starring Kirk Douglas and Craig Nelson. His short stories have appeared inThe Paris Review,The New Yorker,Harper’sandEpoch. He served as a professor of creative writing at Cornell University and as director of Cornell University’s Study Abroad program in Spain. He brings an intimate knowledge of Spanish geography, history, art, and tradition to his novelRomancing Spain, a memoir of how he met and fell in love with his wife of 30 years. His novel,Fractures,takes place in the Ithaca area. It deals, in part, with the current hydrofracking-gas drilling phenomenon and subsequent social upheaval.

/lamar-herrin
Klarman Hall

Dorothy Mermin

Dorothy Mermin received her BA, MA and PhD from Harvard and taught in the Cornell English Department from 1964 to 2002, working primarily in the fields of Victorian literature and women's poetry. Major publications includeThe Audience in the Poem: Five Victorian Poets(1983),Elizabeth Barrett Browning: The Origins of a New Poetry(1989),Godiva’s Ride: Women of Letters in England, 1830-1880(1993), and an anthology (with Herbert Tucker),Victorian Literature 1830-1900(2001). Having arrived at Cornell as an instructor in the year the department first appointed a woman (a beginning assistant professor) to the tenure track, from 1983 to 1989 she served as department Chair.

/dorothy-mermin
Klarman Hall

Laura E. Donaldson

Laura E. Donaldson

/laura-e-donaldson
Klarman Hall

Lynda D. Bogel

Lynda D. Bogel

/lynda-d-bogel
Klarman Hall

Jean Blackall

Jean Frantz Blackall holds a BAmagna cum laudefrom Mount Holyoke and a PhD from Harvard. She did editorial work for the American National Red Cross in Washington, DC, and later for the Harvard Observatory and for William James, son of the philosopher. She came to Cornell in 1958, becoming the first woman tenured in English in 1971 and the first woman professor of English in 1978. She specializes in British and American 19th and early 20th century fiction, particularly in the works of Henry James and Edith Wharton, and in Women’s Studies. She is author of a book on James and of numerous articles on James, Wharton, Harold Frederic, the Victorian novelists. A founding member of the Henry James Society and of the Edith Wharton Society. Recipient of the Cook/Cook Award presented by the Advisory Committee on the Status of Women for service to Cornell Women (1992).

/jean-blackall
Klarman Hall

Sandra Siegel

Sandra Siegel began her teaching career at Cornell in 1965 and served the department of English as Director of Graduate Studies as well. She is a specialist in Victorian literature, and has published a series of articles on Oscar Wilde. She taught and studies in Indonesia and in Ireland. Her awards include a Fulbright fellowship for study in Ireland, a Fulbright lectureship in Indonesia, a Visiting Faculty Fellowship at the National University of Ireland, and a Visiting lectureship at Peking University. She was also a winner of the Clark Award for Distinguished Teaching, and the Clark Award for the Preparation of Courses in the Humanities.

/sandra-siegel
Klarman Hall

Mary Ann Radzinowicz

Mary Ann Radzinowicz taught at Cornell from 1980, after an uninterrupted 20-year academic career in Great Britain. She was the Jacob Gould Schurman Professor of English Literature. Known as a scholar committed to criticism within historical context, her most notable work,Toward Samsom Agonistes: The Growth of Milton's Mind,was published in 1978, followed byAmerican Colonial Prose: John Smith to Thomas Jeffersonin 1984 andMilton's Epics and the Book of Psalmsin 1989. In 1982 she received a Guggenheim fellowship for her research onMilton's Epics and the Book of Psalms, and in 1987 the Milton Society of American named her an Honored Scholar.

/mary-ann-radzinowicz
Klarman Hall

A. Reeve Parker

With undergraduate degrees from Princeton and Oxford and a doctorate from Harvard, Reeve Parker joined the Department in 1967. The chief focus of his research and writing--and much of his teaching--has been in English Romantic poetry and drama, with strong related interests in French Enlightenment and Revolutionary history and literature, especially theatre, and intertextual dynamics. After an earlier book on Coleridge's meditative poetry, a number of essays are now culminating in a book-length work-in-progress--calledDark Employments--on plays by Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley. Other interests are in 19th and 20th century American fiction, with essay projects in Henry James and Flannery O'Connor.

/reeve-parker
Klarman Hall

Kenneth A. McClane

Kenneth McClane, the W.E.B. Du Bois Professor of Literature Emeritus and former Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow at Cornell University, taught English, African American literature, and Creative Writing for 34 years. He is the author of eight poetry collections:Running Before the Wind;Out Beyond the Bay;Moons and Low Times;At Winter's End;To Hear the River;A Tree Beyond Telling: Poems Selected and New;These Halves Are Whole; andTake Five: Collected Poems,1971-1986. In 1992 he published a volume of personal essays,Walls: Essays 1985-1990. A new essay collection,Color: Essays on Race, Family, and Historyappeared in 2009 from the University of Notre Dame Press. The University of Notre Dame Press reprintedWalls, with a new introduction, in 2010.

/kenneth-mcclane
Klarman Hall

Alison Lurie

American writer and scholar Alison Lurie (1926-2020)was probably best known for her novels, which have often been described as social satire. Her first novel,Love and Friendship(1962), is set in the imaginary New England college town of Converse and describes an unexpected love affair.The Nowhere City(1965) takes place in Los Angeles, where Alison Lurie and her family lived from 1957 to 1961. Its characters include a film starlet, a psychiatrist, and other assorted local types.The War Between the Tates(1974) is set in Corinth University, which has been said to have some similarities to Cornell, and its main characters are a professor who becomes involved with a graduate student, and his distressed wife.Real People(1969) andImaginary Friends(1967) also take place in upstate New York: the first in an artists' colony and the second in a small town where a group of eccentrics believe themselves to be in touch with flying saucers.Only Children(1979), the story of a disastrous weekend houseparty, is also set in rural New York state but in the 1930's.From 1970 to 2019, Alison Luriespent part of herwinters in Key West, Florida, which is the setting for much ofThe Truth About Lorin Jones(1989). She also visitedBritain once a year.Foreign Affairs(1984), which won the Pulitzer Prize, takes place in London and relates the adventures of two American academics abroad.The Truth About Lorin Jones(1989), follows the adventures of a biographer who is researching the life of a famous woman painter. It won the Prix Femina Etranger in France.

/alison-lurie
Klarman Hall

Biodun Jeyifo

Professor Jeyifo is a leading literary critic and cultural theorist who has attained great prominence in African intellectual circles for his analysis of modernity and its attendant social and cultural crises. Editor of the authoritative anthology,Modern African Drama(Norton Critical Editions, 2002), Jeyifo's work has long framed scholarship in African drama and theater. His 1984 study of the Yoruba Popular Traveling Theatre is viewed by many as seminal in the study of African drama.

/biodun-jeyifo
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