Two English department doctoral candidates, Jesse Bonafede and Haley Steffens, have been awarded Russel J. and Dorothy S. Bilinski Fellowship in the Humanities from the Bilinski Educational Foundation for 2024.
Jessie Bonafede is a PhD candidate in English with a concentration in Medieval Studies. Her dissertation, titled, Violence Condemned, Violence Condoned: An Analysis of Performative Chivalric Violence in the English Alliterative Romances focuses on medieval literary depictions of chivalric violence and the knight’s masculine body in the English alliterative Arthurian romances of the Hundred Years War. She offers a new theoretical and methodological praxis for analyzing discourses of chivalric violence and gender which stem from her research into literary studies, genre studies, art and military history, anthropology, and sociology. Jessie’s goal is to expand the critical scope of literary investigation to uncover where less recognized and more socially normalized arenas of violence occur, by whom, and why.
Haley Steffens is a Ph.D. Candidate in American Literary Studies in the Department of English Language & Literature. Her field of study addresses immigration and assimilation patterns in North American literature from the nineteenth century into the early twentieth century. Her dissertation, titled, An (Un)Assimilated Nation: Immigration & Assimilation, Autobiographies & Fictions of the Nineteenth Century interrogates varied assimilation experiences in the United States during the nineteenth century, as reflected in literature, and perpetuated culture and ratified by law. Haley’s project approaches the assimilation processes and practices of the period through the experiences of several disparate authors categorized under three groupings—what she calls willing assimilation, resisted assimilation, and non-participatory assimilation.
