English Professor Wins Grants for Renaissance Research
JONESBORO – Dr. Katarzyna Lecky, assistant professor of English, has been selected to receive the Huntington Grant from the Renaissance Society of America to help offset expense incurred with her summer research project, “The Laureate Poetics of Pocket Maps in Renaissance Britain.”
The society recently notified Lecky about the prestigious award, given to one person annually. She also has won grants for the project from the National Endowment for the Humanities and from the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. Together, her three successful project proposals have attracted almost $12,000 in funding.
“If maps are instruments of power, then it matters that during the Renaissance they were found in the pockets of the middle classes,” Lecky explained. “Designed for heavy use by a broad audience, pocket maps even spoke to the illiterate. This book project examines how poets laureate tapped into the brisk business of miniature cartography to reach out to the largest possible audience and place interpretative agency into the hands of Britain's ordinary people.”
The NEH Summer Stipend is a prestigious national fellowship open to scholars across the humanities and social sciences, with an average funding rate of only six percent. The Folger grant supports a short-term residency at one of the top three research libraries for Renaissance scholarship in the United States.
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