Medievalist awarded Guggenheim Fellowship to research Chaucer

Sarah Stanbury, English professor at the College of the Holy Cross, has recently been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, a prestigious annual award that funds travel and research needs. Stanbury, who joined the Holy Cross faculty in 1992, was one of 180 recipients selected from a pool of nearly 3,000 applicants, and will begin her fellowship in January 2011..

Stanbury won for her proposed manuscript, titled Creole Things in Chaucer’s World, which investigates the significance of manmade objects in the writing of Geoffrey Chaucer and by some of his 15th-century successors. In order to complete her research, Stanbury plans to travel to London, Prague and parts of Italy.

According to Stanbury, the idea for her manuscript evolved from previous work she had done on the work of Chaucer, one of her areas of interest.

“My work on Chaucer lately emerged from a book that I wrote in 2008, called The Visual Object of Desire in Late Medieval England,” says Stanbury, who will be on leave for three semesters, having also won a fellowship through Holy Cross. “That book talked about the way people in England wrote about religious objects, like the crucifix or statues of the Virgin Mary. I became interested in how ordinary household objects could be viewed. So this current research I am doing grew right out of my earlier work.”

Stanbury received tenure in 1996, serving as chair of the English department from 1997-99. The author of numerous articles and books, including The Visual Object of Desire in Late Medieval England (University of Pennsylvania Press, Middle Ages Series, 2008), Pearl (Medieval Institute Publications, 2001) and Seeing the Gawain-Poet: Description and the Act of Perception, (Middle Ages Series, 1991), Stanbury has also won the O’Leary Faculty Recognition Award. Stanbury earned her B.A. in literature at Bennington College and her Ph.D. in English at Duke University.

The Guggenheim Fellowship competition is in its 86th year and awards are given to a diverse group of applicants, from artists to scientists, based on a candidate’s accomplishments and the promise of their project

Source: Holy Cross