Professors Maus and Ramazani receive Guggenheim fellowships

By Robert Brickhouse

Stephanie Gross

Katharine Maus

Two English professors have been chosen to receive prestigious Guggenheim Fellowships this year, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has announced. The awards, which provide a cash prize to allow recipients time to further their work, are given for unusually distinguished achievement and exceptional promise.

Professor Katharine Maus, an authority on the English Renaissance, will use her fellowship beginning next January to write a history of English literature for the period 1603-1660, to be published in Oxford University Press's English literary history series. Maus also has received an American Council of Learned Societies Senior Fellowship to help her pursue that project.

Jahan Ramazani

Professor Jahan Ramazani, a scholar of modern poetry, will use his Guggenheim Fellowship in the coming academic year to complete a book titled The Hybrid Muse: Postcolonial Poetry in English, to be published by the University of Chicago Press. He has also received a Virginia Foundation for the Humanities Fellowship for the spring semester.

Maus, who has taught at U.Va. since 1988, is the author of numerous articles and books, including Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance, which won the Roland Baintain Prize for an outstanding book in Renaissance studies in 1996. Co-editor of The Norton Shakespeare, published in 1997, she has received several honors including a Folger Institute fellowship and an NEH fellowship.

Her new book on the 17th century will examine, among other topics, how authors of the period thought of their work, who audiences were, and how local places became popular subjects of works.

Ramazani is the author of Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Yeats and the Poetry of Death: Elegy, Self-Elegy, and the Sublime. Since joining the English faculty in 1988, he has received numerous honors and fellowships including a Lilly Teaching Fellowship and an NEH fellowship. He served as chair of U.Va.'s faculty senate in 1997-98.

In his book-in-progress -- the first on postcolonial poetry in English -- he argues that poets of Africa, India, and the Caribbean have dramatically expanded the possibilities of English-language poetry by hybridizing Western and indigenous resources. The book will focus on leading Anglophone poets of five nations formerly under British rule.