This past autumn, English graduate students Dan Knapper and Rachel Miller were each awarded a Presidential Fellowship, the most prestigious award given by Ohio State’s Graduate School. Recipients of this award embody the highest standards of scholarship in the full range of Ohio State's graduate programs.

Knapper specializes in the literature, art and culture of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. His broad research interests include the Bible and its Renaissance literary and cultural afterlives; theories and practices of style and rhetoric; and literary engagements with Reformation theology and ecclesiology. Much of his scholarship focuses on the reception and influence of biblical styles in Reformation literary culture, particularly the influence of Saint Paul’s New Testament epistles. Knapper will use the support afforded by the Presidential to complete his dissertation “‘Thunderings, Not Words’: Pauline Style and Reformation English Literature.”

Miller is a PhD student researching how feminist activist archives and teenage girlhood might become a vernacular for considering the turn away from postmodern literature in America during the 1990s and early 2000s. She works on comics, zines, VHS chainletters and other pop culture artifacts. Miller will use the support afforded by the fellowship to finish work on her dissertation, “The Girls’ Room: Bedroom Cultures and the Ephemeral Archive in the 1990s.”

by Michaela Corning-Myers