Recipient of first Michael DePorte English Department Book Award is announced

The Department of English and the UNH Foundation are pleased to announce that Rachel Trubowitz, associate professor of English, is the recipient of the first award from the Michael DePorte English Department Book Fund. The purpose of this memorial award is to enable Professor DePorte’s colleagues in the English Department to acquire texts of special importance to their teaching and research.

Trubowitz will use her award to acquire books of use in her current research project -- a book-length study provisionally titled Mortal Verse: Poetry, Politics, and Death in Civil War England. As scholars in the field know, the highly contested nature of death in Reformation England has been the subject of some of the most innovative recent scholarship in early modern literary studies. In her proposed book, Trubowitz will focus on four poets whose verse highlights the special contribution that the Revolutionary decades (1640-1660) make to the history of death and the gendering of death in England. She has laid the groundwork for this new study in her published essay, “Sublime/Pauline: Denying Death in Paradise Lost,” which appeared in Imagining Death in Spenser and Milton, edited by UNH Professor Elizabeth Jane Bellamy, and others.

Trubowitz’s work with current UNH graduate students has also had an informing influence on this project.  In 2004 she focused a graduate seminar on the “Moral Verse” of poets writing during the Revolutionary decades, and the course was so very well received by her students that she plans to offer a different version of this seminar in 2006.

A UNH professor for 31 years, DePorte devoted much of his career to the study of 18th century literature, particularly the writings of Irish author Jonathan Swift, famous for his 1726 work, Gulliver’s Travels. Prior to his death Dec. 9, 2003, from non-Hodgkins lymphoma, DePorte asked the English Department to establish a book fund in his name to enable junior faculty members to purchase texts for their teaching and research that they would not otherwise be able to afford.