English Department Events
Heather Hirschfeld named NEH Fellow for 2009-10
We’re pleased to announce that Heather Hirschfeld has won a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for the 2009-10 academic year to work on her current book project, “Tragedies of Satisfaction: Drama, Reform, and Repentance in Shakespeare’s Age.”
Heather, who teaches courses in Shakespeare and Renaissance drama and prose, as well as classes in psychoanalysis and literature, is also an active participant in the Marco Institute. She describes the focus of her project in this way:
Tragedies of Satisfaction: Drama, Reform and Repentance in the Age of Shakespeare studies Christian ideas of atonement and their representation on the English Renaissance stage. It suggests that controversies during the Reformation about penitential practice and the ability of human beings to compensate – to satisfy--for sin forced a shift in the experience of satisfaction, of making and feeling enough. The project explores the unique ways in which Shakespeare and his contemporaries understood and dramatized this shift in tragic plots that bear witness to protagonists’ efforts, in Hamlet’s words, “to set things right.”
This project continues Heather’s scholarly explorations in Renaissance drama. Her first book, Joint Enterprises: Collaborative Drama and the Institutionalization of the English Renaissance Theater (2004), studied the phenomenon of the shared writing of play scripts by early modern English dramatists such as Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and Thomas Middleton.
Heather joins David Reidy, an Associate Professor of Philosophy at UT, as the two faculty from UT to receive an NEH this year. Fellowships from NEH are highly competitive. Only 76 winners were chosen from all colleges and universities nationwide this year, with only 6 percent of applicants receiving the award. UT Knoxville was one of just nine universities in the nation to receive two or more of the fellowships this year.
Leadership in the number of NEH fellowships is the result of a concerted effort at UT Knoxville; the campus is tied with the University of Virginia with the sixth most NEH fellows in the U.S. over the past five years. A number of other English Department faculty, including Tom Heffernan, Mike Lofaro, Janet Atwill, and Roy Liuzza, have also won NEH fellowships, which are used by a number of outside parties as a measure of the success of a university's programs in the humanities.
Congratulations to Heather on this new recognition of her work.