Department of English

Hardeep Sidhu Receives Gilman Award

Congratulations to Hardeep Sidhu (PhD '16), who, along with Jenny Boyar (PhD '16), has won the 2016-17 William H. Gilman Memorial Prize. The prize is awarded annually by the department to "an outstanding PhD candidate" -- usually a student who is about to graduate or has just graduated -- "in English or American Literature." 

Hardeep's dissertation, entitled "Pulp History: American Historical Fiction in the Twenty-First Century," seeks to explain a recent movement among contemporary authors toward genre fiction -- fantasy, comics, sci-fi, and the Western -- as an innovative strategy to understand the past, leaving behind traditional literary and historiographical approaches so as to be able to better to represent the stories of marginalized cultures and identities. The dissertation analyzes the work of Junot Diaz and Michael Chabon, among others. 

Hardeep is currently finishing his first year at Worcester State College, where he is an Assistant Professor of English.

Professor William H. Gilman was one of his generation's foremost scholars of American literature. He taught at the University of Rochester 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.