2020 Larry Morris Scholarship Award recipients

This year we were able to award full $2,500 scholarships to two outstanding UNM graduate students in the English department to support their dissertation research and writing.

LAUREN PERRY is a PhD student in American Literary Studies in the English Department at UNM. She has completed all of her doctoral coursework and is currently writing her dissertation, “Animal Texts: American Environmental Literature and Its Potential Power to Save Nonhuman Lives Through Animal Studies Readings”. Her specialized focus in American Literary Studies is nineteenth and twentieth century American literature, along with Southwestern Literature with specific research of texts that interrogate human-animal relationships. Her dissertation analyzes the work of several environmentalist and animal activist writers of fiction and creative nonfiction that span the late nineteenth century to the twenty-first century. ( Sarah Orne Jewett’s “A White Heron” (1886) and Jack London’s “To Build a Fire” (1902), Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac (1949) and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire (1968), Terry Tempest Williams’ Refuge (1991) and Barry Lopez’s Of Wolves and Men (1978), and finally, Dan Flores’ Coyote America (2016) and Nate Blakeslee’s American Wolf (2017). The first chapter and second chapters of this project have each been accepted for publication as animal studies articles.

The scope of her project specifically includes discussion and rethinking of animal encounters in American environmental literature that as one of her professors stated, "promises to tell the literary history of environmental writing by way of crucial encounters ...encounters that not only map the emergence of environmental literature but point to a critical understanding of such encounters through a rhetoric of spirituality that scientific and secular environmentalisms overlook." As Lauren herself puts it, "As the authors and texts in my dissertation chapters convey, understanding of animal life, not the symbolic or representative figure of the animals but actual animal life, involves a renegotiation of our understanding of what it is to be human. This is, in itself, a spiritual endeavor." This "spiritual endeavor" can be sparked by animal encounters that reveal glimpses of nonhuman spirituality. It is Lauren's hope that such revelation can lead to "greater respect, understanding, and care for life of the nonhuman inhabitants of the world." This in turn, she argues, is critical to humanity and all life on earth in the face of grave environmental events and climate change. "Humans, as the primary culprits of environmental destruction, must use their powers of language to close the gap between animals and humans, as the earth supports all of us the same. "

Lauren was selected on the basis of her outstanding academic record, the scope and originality of her project, and the potential it holds not only for critical animal theory and environmental literature and its rhetoric, but also for its potential to impact concepts and practices of 21st Century spirituality through new ways of understanding nonhuman animals, their intelligence and capabilities, their own distinct spirituality and the potentiality and mystery of human/non human encounters. We also recognize the underlying imperative of her work and its sense of urgency in offering a re-conceptualization of humanity's relationship and responsibility toward animals as we face global ecological upheaval and climate change. We are pleased to award her this 2020 Larry Morris Memorial Scholarship.

EMMA MINCKS is a PhD student in British and Irish Literary Studies, now in the early stages of her dissertation research. Her project concerns nineteenth century political and spiritual discrimination against land-based spirituality and its consequences happening still today for peoples across the globe. The focus of her research is the nineteenth century concept of "the savage" or as she frames it in a historic context, "savage spirituality". She will be examining Victorian attitudes toward the spiritual practices of colonized peoples that used the construct of "savage" as a way of gaining and maintaining imperial power, particularly with the spirituality of indigenous people. (The Victorian era is generally defined as 1837-1901, the reign of British Queen Victoria, when Britain was the most powerful empire in the world and the empire was undergoing rapid industrialization.) She will explore not just the utility and impact of the concept of "savage", but also it's multi-dimensional roots, tracing the ways by which the idea of "savage" was honed and conveyed through various aspects of British culture, and applied to certain subgroups of peoples. She also will examine the dynamic between the construct of savage and the cultural need to "modify, erase, or 'civilize' any 'savage' spirituality to sanitize it for a dominant English audience."

At this core of the cultural struggle with "savage spirituality", there lies the issue of land in a time of rapid urbanization and industrialization, with ideas and practices which deeply conflicted with the spiritual awareness of indigenous people where the land and the people were inseparably connected in a holistic relationship with the natural world. Emma's project looks at the conflict from varying perspectives, including the symbolic and collective unconscious. As one of her professor's wrote, "Emma's research operates at the vanguard of Victorian literary studies by recovering through digital archives, 'silenced voices and marginalized cultural and spiritual practices'..." Emma adds, "We still see a rejection of land-based spiritualities across the globe today, and as climate destruction is reaching new levels of disregard for planetary life, we need to understand the urgency of this longstanding conflict between human connectedness with the natural world and “empirical” divisions created by false separation between peoples and the lands they reside on.”

Emma was selected on the basis of her impressive academic record, the scope, interdisciplinary scholarship and originality of her project, and the potential it holds not only for contributions to nineteenth-century literary and cultural studies, but also for its potential to impact concepts and practices of 21st Century spirituality through new ways of understanding the complexity of cultural, economic, political, and unconscious psychological conflict that revolves around religious and spiritual traditions, and in particular those of indigenous peoples.    We also recognize her project's potential to offer new insight, through the history and stories of indigenous people, into humanity's spiritual /mystical relationship with the natural environment that remains in conflict with cultural concepts of ownership and the control and exploitation of people, land, and natural resources--now crucial issues for our world. We are pleased to award her this 2020 Larry Morris Memorial Scholarship.