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
Major Professor: Christie Desmet
Thesis: “Taking the Hermeneutical Hill: Hearing Veterans In The Writing Classroom”