Recent Faculty & Student Accomplishments

Cates Baldridge

Plowswords: Literature and the Agricultural Trap from Shakespeare to Coetzee 
(University of Virginia Press, forthcoming July 2024)

“Race and the Human Origins Debate in Frankenstein” 
(The Journal of Literature and Science, forthcoming 2024)

Timothy Billings

Ezra Pound Society Book Prize
for Ezra Pound’s Cathay: A Critical Edition (Fordham UP, 2020)

Dan Brayton

Named a Visiting Fellow in the Blue Humanities at Sea Education Association of Wood’s Hole, MA for February-March, 2024.

“Bugs Aquatic: Water Striders from Moffett to Marine Science.”
In Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance: Volume 1, Insects, eds. Keith Botelho and Joe Campana. College Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2023. 216-229.

Robert Cohen 

Going to the Tigers: Essays and Exhortations (2022)

Megan Mayhew-Bergman

How Strange a Season (2022) 
Featured as a New York Times Editor’s Choice and in the New Yorker’s Best Books of 2022 list, and long-listed for the 2023 Joyce Carol Oates Fiction Prize and The Story Prize.

Can a Museum Embody Environmental Justice? 
In The Guardian. 8 Feb. 2023.

How Allan Gurganus Became a Writer
In the New Yorker. 4 Apr. 2023. 

Spring Ulmer

Tupelo Press 2022 Dorset Prize

for Phantom Number: An Abecedarium for April

Marion Wells

Gender, Affect, and Emotion from Classical to Early Modern Literature: Afterlives of the Nightingale’s Song (2024)

Sam Gordon Wexler ’23.5

Thomas J. Watson Fellowship

The Thomas J. Wat­son Fel­low­ship is a one-year grant for pur­pose­ful, inde­pen­dent explo­ration out­side the U.S., award­ed to grad­u­at­ing seniors.

Engaging with different end-of-life care practices and funeral traditions, Sam plans to understand the cultural and social attitudes, and the healthcare systems, that shape how we die, to catalyze changes in care that redefine a ‘good death.’ As of right now, Sam will be traveling to the United Kingdom, Ghana, India, and Switzerland beginning in August.

Emma Tzotschew ’23.5

James M. Meyer Grant (2022)



The English Department awards annually up to two Winter Term travel stipends of $2,000-$4,000 each for students who wish to pursue a nonfiction creative writing project during January.



“While Catalina [California] was a new landscape to explore, I also explored the landscapes of emotion and memory, with attention to the ways in which familial tension, understanding, and memory are then mediated through the physical landscape.” 

Arthur Martins ’23.5

Kellogg Fellowship
Awarded to support senior work and original research in the humanities related to a student’s major program of study.

Arthur received the fellowship in support of his joint English and Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies thesis “Meat Markets: Queer Examinations of Grindr.” During summer 2023, he lived in New York City and São Paulo, Brazil, interviewing queer men to understand how technology is impacting queer desires, identities, and communities. Advised by Professor Ulmer, Arthur will write a collection of creative nonfiction essays to share these stories of defiance, reinvention, and human connection in the age of digital love.”

Tasha Deen ’25

Kellogg Fellowship
Awarded to support senior work and original research in the humanities related to a student’s major program of study.

Tasha received the fellowship in support of her thesis in English Literature, ‘Finding Ourselves: Women’s Voices in Twentieth Century Irish Short Fiction’. She will spend part of the summer living in Dublin, Ireland, studying the short stories of Mary Lavin and Edna O’Brien. Advised by Professor Graves, Tasha’s critical thesis seeks to explore Irish women’s lives and subsequent narratives written by women during the mid-late twentieth century.

Yardena Carmi ’23

Stolley-Ryan American Literature Prize

Awarded to the graduating senior majoring in American literature whose work in the department best reveals the greatest understanding and appreciation of the issues central to the American literary tradition.

From her first seminar, on Dickinson and Bishop, to Multi-ethnic American Literature, all the way through “American Literature Since 1945” Yardena contributed incisive commentary and wrote thoughtful and eloquent essays in every class. She is herself an American writer.

Abigail Chang ’23

Henry B. Prickitt English Prize
Awarded to a graduating senior whose work in the Department of English has been outstanding.

Abigail has impressed the English faculty with her curiosity, her nimbleness of mind in synthesizing and applying knowledge gleaned from different spheres of learning, her commitment to ethical discourse, and her creative energy and facility with language, all of which leads us to expect even more outstanding work to come.

Emma Crockford ’22.5

Charles Baker Wright Prize

Awarded to students for meritorious work in English.

Emma is gifted with talent, a great eye for story, and a wonderful ear for language – however, it’s her work ethic that proved transformative at Middlebury. Emma has a great sense of specificity, place, and the odd detail – and her work bursts with strangeness, humor, and tenderness.  

Noah Hochfelder ’22.5

Reid L. Carr Class of 1901 Prize

Awarded to the senior man who has shown the greatest proficiency in English literature.

Noah received this award because of his outstanding work as a thinker and scholar and his excellent work in our courses. He is a distinguished student of literature, a sophisticated reader of complex and challenging texts, and a marvelously clear and elegant writer.

Bel Spelman ’23

Donald Everett Axinn ‘51 Annual Prize
Awarded by the writing program faculty to a junior or senior student whose work has been distinguished and warrants special encouragement. 

Bel writes with the combination of imaginative fluency and rigorous attention to craft. In their work they have cast an impressively wide net, bringing in the influences of the music they love, the cadences and diction of family, co-workers, and regional idiom, as well as the literary traditions and innovations they have studied. At the same time, they have developed a voice and vision all their own.  

Kai Velazquez ’23

Charles Baker Wright Prize

Awarded to students for meritorious work in English.

Prof. Spring Ulmer writes: Kai’s creative writing–filled with the understanding and resisting of systemic injustices, as well as a glimpse into their life as a teen–grants me hope. In Kai’s poems, friends become family. In their essays, language becomes blood: it pounds and energizes.