News & Events

Jenny Boyar Receives Gilman Award

May 25, 2017

Congratulations to Jenny Boyar (PhD '16), who, along with Hardeep Sidhu (PhD '16), has received the 2016-17 William H.  Gilman Memorial Prize. The prize, created in honor of a former UR professor of American literature, is awarded annually by the department to an "outstanding PhD candidate" -- or very recent graduate -- "in English or American Literature."

Jenny's dissertation, "Lyric Form and the Charge of Forgetfulness in Medieval and Renaissance Poetry," in tracing a chronology of lyric form through the work of Chaucer and Wyatt, locates the origins of "lyric voice" at those moments in the poems in which traditionally-held beliefs about memory are being called into question. 

Jenny currently works as a medical writer for VirtualScopics, Inc., in addition to serving as a reviewer for Publishers Weekly.

Professor William H. Gilman was one of his generation's foremost scholars of American literature. He taught in the University of Rochester's English Department for nearly 30 years, up until his death in 1976. After publishing a definitive study of Herman Melville, Gilman became a founding editor, and then chief editor, of the journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson.