News and Events
Features
Faculty Win Two National Endowment for the Humanities Research Awards
The high caliber of Ohio State English faculty was showcased yet again when it was announced that English Department Professors Richard Dutton and Karen Winstead won coveted National Endowment for the Humanities Research Awards. The awards will allow both professors to take a year's paid sabbatical to research and write books in their respective fields.
Richard Dutton, who earned his Ph.D. from the University of Nottingham, in England, will research and write Shakespeare, Court Dramatist. "One of the things that has obsessed Shakespearean scholars for a long time is the fact that many of his texts exist in more than one form—in fact, about half of them do," said Dutton. "Quite a few of Shakespeare's plays exist in versions that couldn't be performed. Hamlet, for example, exists in three different texts, two of which take over four hours to perform. Our understanding is that plays in the Elizabethan theater normally ran two or two and a half hours."
"We know that Shakespeare's plays were extremely popular at court," said Dutton. "We also know that some plays were certainly revised for court, and when revised, they were invariably expanded. The question I want to ask in my research is: is it possible that a significant number of the texts that survive are versions that were adapted for courts rather than the public theater?"
Karen Winstead, who earned her Ph.D. from Indiana University, will write 15th Century Lives: Gender, Politics, and Orthodoxy in Medieval English Hagiography, a monograph about the use of the traditional genre of saints' lives in controversial discussions of the 15th century. "There was a great deal of political, social, and religious turmoil in the fifteenth century, and there were certain censorship measures that were being undertaken that limited what could be said on religious topics. So, a lot of really interesting discussions on controversial topics started taking place in what would have been considered safe, boring, and bland genres," said Winstead.
"There were interesting changes in the stories at this time: more interest in historical context; more interest in moral dilemmas and character; more theologically ambitious saints' lives started to be written in the fifteenth century," said Winstead. "I'm also interested in looking at saints' lives as an antecedent to literature of the Reformation period."
Given the competitiveness for these awards, it is unusual for a single department to receive two. "These are relatively rare awards," said Dutton. "The department has done phenomenally well to get two of them in one year."
