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Spotlight: Graduate Students

Spotlight: Graduate Students

Bob Volpicelli and Katie Owens, recent graduate student recipients of CALS funding, report on their successes.

Every year, the Center for American Literary Studies awards a number of grants and fellowships to various Penn State graduate students.

Robert Volpicelli photo

Robert Volpicelli

Robert Volpicelli was awarded funding for graduate travel to a research collection. This award allowed him to travel to the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia, home of Marianne Moore's letters, papers, and a reconstruction of the famous living room of her apartment in Greenwich Village. His research resulted in the article, “Against Things: the At-Home Objects of Marianne Moore,” forthcoming in Twentieth-Century Literature.

Katie Owens-Murphy photo

Katie Owens-Murphy

While Volpicelli's award granted him the space to travel in order to better examine Marianne Moore's spaces, the award granted to Katie Owens-Murphy, the recipient of the 2012 Summer Graduate Fellowship, gave Owens-Murphy the gift of time. She was able to spend the summer finishing her dissertation project, “Lyrical Strategies: The Poetics of Fiction in the 20th Century American Novel.” She writes that the project "takes a comparative approach to genre by examining twentieth-century

American novels in relation to the lyric, rather than the narrative, tradition. I argue that many novelists from this period abandon the defining characteristics of narrative fiction for rhetorical aims that we typically associate with lyric poetry-- structural repetition, rhythm, figurative meaning, dramatic personae, and apostrophe." Thanks to the Summer Graduate Fellowship, Owens-Murphy defended her dissertation in the early fall and is currently on the job market.

Bob Volpicelli and Katie Owens, recent graduate student recipients of CALS funding, report on their successes.

Every year, the Center for American Literary Studies awards a number of grants and fellowships to various Penn State graduate students.

Robert Volpicelli photo

Robert Volpicelli

Robert Volpicelli was awarded funding for graduate travel to a research collection. This award allowed him to travel to the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia, home of Marianne Moore's letters, papers, and a reconstruction of the famous living room of her apartment in Greenwich Village. His research resulted in the article, “Against Things: the At-Home Objects of Marianne Moore,” forthcoming in Twentieth-Century Literature.

Katie Owens-Murphy photo

Katie Owens-Murphy

While Volpicelli's award granted him the space to travel in order to better examine Marianne Moore's spaces, the award granted to Katie Owens-Murphy, the recipient of the 2012 Summer Graduate Fellowship, gave Owens-Murphy the gift of time. She was able to spend the summer finishing her dissertation project, “Lyrical Strategies: The Poetics of Fiction in the 20th Century American Novel.” She writes that the project "takes a comparative approach to genre by examining twentieth-century

American novels in relation to the lyric, rather than the narrative, tradition. I argue that many novelists from this period abandon the defining characteristics of narrative fiction for rhetorical aims that we typically associate with lyric poetry-- structural repetition, rhythm, figurative meaning, dramatic personae, and apostrophe." Thanks to the Summer Graduate Fellowship, Owens-Murphy defended her dissertation in the early fall and is currently on the job market.