This year, the UVA quizbowl team consisting of Matt Bollinger (undergrad, English), Tommy Casalaspi (undergrad, English), Evan Adams (grad, law), and Dennis Loo (grad, math) performed the rare feat of uniting the sport's two national titles. On March 29 they won the NAQT Intercollegiate Championship Tournament.
At its 313th Commencement on Monday, May 19, 2014, Yale University bestowed an Honorary Doctor of Letters on Rita Dove, Commonwealth Professor of English at the University of Virginia.
Anna Ioanes, a PhD candidate in the English Department, has won this year's Zora Neale Hurston prize for best graduate student essay. The competition was held by the department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality. Ioanes's essay is titled "Disgustingly Beautiful: Affect and Aesthetics in Sula and Kara Walker's 'Silhouettes'."
An interview with Professor Bruce Holsinger will air on With Good Reason beginning May 31st to June 6th. You can find broadcast times posted here.
The 2014-2015 Scholars' Lab graduate fellows include three graduate students from the English Department- Jennifer Foy, Amy Boyd, and Andrew Ferguson.
Rita Dove, Commonwealth Professor of English, has released the following statement on Maya Angelou's life and work:
Maya Angelou was indeed a phenomenal woman – rising from the ashes of a childhood that would have rendered many of us mute and enraged, she made her way in a world that all too often despised her kind – a black woman, tall, fierce, and most fearsome of all, unafraid.
Professor Andrew Stauffer traveled to Greece as a representative of the Byron Society of America, where he gave a lecture on Byron’s poetry to approximately 200 local citizens of Messolonghi.
Jerome McGann, University Professor and John Stewart Bryan Professor of English, has been elected to the American Philosophical Society. He becomes the eighth U.Va. scholar to join the ranks of the country’s first learned society, joining such previous members as Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Charles Darwin, Marie Curie, Albert Einstein, and Robert Frost. Election to the society honors extraordinary accomplishments in all fields.
The Library of Congress will name Charles Wright, Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Virginia, America's next poet laureate. Wright, whose work he once described as reckoning with “language, landscape, and the idea of God,” has formerly won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the Bollingen Prize and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize.
Read more about Wright and his poetry at the New York Times article here.
Professor Lisa Woolfork has garnered a flurry of media attention with her popular 'Game of Thrones' course. The class, offered this summer as a four-week, discussion-based seminar, focuses on the Emmy- and Golden Globe-winning HBO series and George R. R. Martin's 'A Song of Ice and Fire' novels, on which the series is based. In their discussions, students analyzed the series in light of topics including racial and cultural allegory, gender roles and power, identity formation, and fan fiction.
![MOSQUITOES [by William Faulkner]](https://english.as.virginia.edu/sites/english.as.virginia.edu/files/styles/publication_crop__180x250_/public/vander2.jpg?itok=CRKFR0a2)
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