Announcements, Awards

Graduate Students Receive Larry Memorial Scholarship

Lauren Perry, an ALS PhD Candidate, received the first place award for the 2020 Larry Memorial Scholarship for her dissertation, “Animal Texts: American Environmental Literature and Its Potential Power to Save Nonhuman Lives Through Animal Studies Readings.” Perry is currently ABD and has two forthcoming publications relating directly to her dissertation. The Larry Memorial Scholarship Committee at the Hillside Source said of Perry and her dissertation project, “[She was] selected on the basis of [her] outstanding academic record, the scope and originality of [her] project, and the potential it holds not only for critical animal theory and environmental literature and its rhetoric, but also for its potential to impact concepts and practices of 21st Century spirituality through new ways of understanding non human animals, their intelligence and capabilities, their own distinct spirituality and the potentiality and mystery of human/non human encounters. [There is an] underlying imperative of [her] work and its sense of urgency in offering a re-conceptualization of humanity’s relationship and responsibility toward animals as [humanity] face[s] global ecological upheaval and climate change.”

Perry currently teaches in Core Writing and in the Health, Medicine, and Human Values BA/MD program.

Emma Mincks, a BILS PhD student in the early stages of her dissertation research for her project concerning nineteenth century political and spiritual discrimination against land-based spirituality and its consequences happening still today for peoples across the globe, is also a recipient of The Larry Memorial Scholarship . The focus of her research is the nineteenth century concept of “the savage” or as she frames it in a historic context, “savage spirituality”. She will be examining Victorian attitudes toward the spiritual practices of colonized peoples that used the construct of “savage” as a way of gaining and maintaining imperial power, particularly with the spirituality of indigenous people. She will explore not just the utility and impact of the concept of “savage”, but also it’s multi-dimensional roots, tracing the ways by which the idea of “savage” was honed and conveyed through various aspects of British culture, and applied to certain subgroups of peoples. She also will examine the dynamic between the construct of savage and the cultural need to “modify, erase, or ‘civilize’ any ‘savage’ spirituality to sanitize it for a dominant English audience.”

The Larry Memorial Scholarship Committee at the Hillside Source said that “Emma was selected on the basis of her impressive academic record, the scope, interdisciplinary scholarship and originality of her project, and the potential it holds not only for contributions to nineteenth-century literary and cultural studies, but also for its potential to impact concepts and practices of 21st Century spirituality through new ways of understanding the complexity of cultural, economic, political, and unconscious psychological conflict that revolves around religious and spiritual traditions, and in particular those of indigenous peoples. We also recognize her project’s potential to offer new insight, through the history and stories of indigenous people, into humanity’s spiritual /mystical relationship with the natural environment that remains in conflict with cultural concepts of ownership and the control and exploitation of people, land, and natural resources–now crucial issues for our world.”