HATTIESBURG – An English professor at the University of Southern Mississippi has been awarded a 2006-2007 National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Fellowship, a major award for research in literature, history, the social sciences and the arts.

Dr. William Kuskin, chair of the Department of English, received the grant for a book project on English literary history. His second book, it connects the writers of the late Middle Ages, such as Geoffrey Chaucer, to those of the Renaissance, such as William Shakespeare.

The National Endowment for the Humanities is an independent grant-making agency of the United States government dedicated to supporting research, education, preservation, and public programs in the humanities. The Endowment received 1,395 applications for Fellowships in 2005. Only 155 applications were awarded, a success rate of about 11 percent.

“This is only one example of the wonderful work coming out of the English department right now.  The whole department is in a kind of rush of activity—in research, teaching and planning—and the atmosphere is conducive to real creativity,” Kuskin said.

Kuskin’s new work argues against the traditional view of English literary history.  Instead of a sudden culture of originality in the 16^th century that produces the monuments of English literature, he argues that the English 15^th century develops a potent literary heritage that educates these later writers.

“The major writers of the 16^th century certainly were original, but their originality comes out of the past.  They were intense readers of the 15^th century—think for instance of Shakespeare’s history plays—and consciously looked back to the history and poetry of the early period to shape their own,” Kuskin said.

Applications for the NEH Fellowship are carefully reviewed by the staff and by accomplished scholars who act as outside readers.  According to Jim Turner, NEH Division of Research Programs, “The NEH staff commented on matters of fact or on significant issues that otherwise would have been missing from these evaluations and made recommendations to the National Council on the Humanities. The National Council meets at various times during the year to advise the NEH chairman on grants.”

Dr. Elliott Pood, dean of the College of Arts and Letters, congratulated Kuskin on his Fellowship, which totaled $40,000. “This is a substantial grant in the humanities. Dr. Kuskin is both a credit to the College of Arts and Letters and an example of the quality faculty we have here at Southern Miss,” Pood said.

A panelist on the jury that recommended Kuskin for the fellowship said of his work, “This is indeed an impressive proposal; his desire to complicate our perception of the relationship between 16^th-century ‘early moderns’ and 15^th-century manuscript and print culture is provocative, learned and potentially pathbreaking.”

Kuskin received his master’s and doctoral degree at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. An expert on the history of the book, Kuskin has published a number of articles on early printing, and his writing on William Caxton has won the New Medieval Literatures’ Best Essay Prize as well as a grant from the Stanford Humanities Center.  Kuskin is currently completing two book-length projects on the subject: a monograph titled Symbolic Caxton: 15th-Century Literary Culture and the Forms of Print Capitalism and a collection of essays on early print culture, Caxton’s Trace: Studies in the History of English Printing, which has just come out.