CONWAY, Ark. (Sept. 15, 2005) - Ashby Bland Crowder, a professor at Hendrix College, will receive the coveted South Central Modern Language Association's 2004 Book Prize at the association's fall conference on Oct. 28.
A Fulbright Scholar, Crowder is receiving the award for his book, Wakeful Anguish: A Literary Biography of William Humphry. The prize is given by the SCMLA and its Selection Committee for the best scholarly or critical book published by a member of SCMLA during 2004.
Crowder, a Hendrix professor of English, American Literature and the Humanities, will be unable to accept the award in person because he is spending the 2005-06 academic year teaching in Łódz, Poland, as a Fulbright Scholar. He is teaching several classes and graduate seminars in American Literature at the University of Łódz .
The Fulbright Program was established by the U.S. Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs in 1946 to help build understanding between people of the United States and other countries. The J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board selects Scholar Award winners based on academic achievement and leadership.
Crowder, who earned a bachelor's degree at Randolph-Macon College, received a master's degree from the University of Tennessee and his doctorate in English from the University of London. He joined the Hendrix faculty in 1974, and his specialty is Victorian literature.
Crowder has published three other books and has three pending. His articles have been published in such journals as The Southern Review, The South Atlantic Review and British Studies Intelligencer. His poems have been published in The Mid-America Poetry Review, Poet, and Humanities in the South. He has evaluated book manuscripts for the University of Tennessee Press and University of Alabama Press as well as serving on the Editorial Board of Studies in Browning and His Circle.
The Book Prize and the Fulbright Scholar add to his previous 10 awards and grants, including the Franklin Research Grant from the American Philosophical Society, the Mellon Fellowship for research at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center in Austin, Texas, the National Endowment for the Humanities Travel to Collections Grant and the National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Fellowship.
Hendrix, founded in 1876, is a selective, residential, undergraduate liberal arts college that emphasizes experiential learning in a demanding yet supportive environment. The college, the recipient of the 2005 Arthur Vining Davis Foundations' Award for Excellence, has been affiliated with the United Methodist Church since 1884. In April 2005, Hendrix was selected by the Princeton Review as the nation's No. 4 "best value" college in its "Top 10 Best Value Colleges" ranking list. For more information about Hendrix, visit www.hendrix.edu.
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Contact: Judy Williams, 501/450-1462