Peter Murray, PhD Candidate, Receives Harry Ransom and NEMLA Fellowships

Peter Murray, a Ph.D. English candidate, has received not one but two prestigious fellowships: a Harry Ransom Center Dissertation Research Fellowship and a Northeast Modern Language Association (NEMLA) 2015 Summer Fellowship Award. These awards will support work on his dissertation, which centers on 1930s feminist writers such as Una Marson, Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, and Robin Hyde. In this work, Murray argues that these writers reevaluate the successes and failures of the feminist movement through their representations of precarious children.   

Both awards will allow Murray to do archival research at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. While on the Ransom Center Fellowship, he plans to examine the Elizabeth Bowen papers, especially the manuscript materials for her 1935 novel The House in Paris, focusing on Bowen's representation of childhood sexuality. Murray contends that Bowen's aesthetic representation of queer children produces an affective response of dread for both adult characters in the novel as well as the reader. With the NEMLA Award, Peter will extend his time at the Ransom Center in order to consult the feminist magazine Time and Tide (1920-1986) as well as papers by Virginia Woolf, Marie Stopes, and other facilitators of transnational feminist modernism.

In its award letter, NEMLA commended Murray "for successfully competing against a particularly strong group of applicants." Murray's colleagues in Fordham's English department--faculty, staff, and fellow graduate students--echo those congratulations!