Jill Caskey / CMS Alumni Dissertation Award citation/ 29 October 2015:
“One of my favorite parts of working as PhD Coordinator at CMS was learning about the research of the Centre’s doctoral students. I was, and remain, consistently struck by how students — how all of you — combine intense linguistic training with interdisciplinary sophistication, and then take your research in so many different directions. The range of materials, themes, and concepts probed by CMS students is remarkable, as is the quality of the dissertations they produce.
This year there were eight contenders for the Alumni Dissertation Award. Their work represents a broad spectrum of disciplinary and methodological frameworks. Some of these dissertations examine little-known or neglected sources in order to bring them into lively scholarly debates. Others revisit Old Favourites, and through exacting yet creative interdisciplinary analysis, convince us to see these Old Favourites in a new light.
The winner of this year’s Alumni Dissertation Award is Justin Haynes, whose dissertation is entitled “Recovering the Classic: Twelfth-Century Latin Epic and the Virgilian Tradition.” Members of the alumni jury describe the dissertation as “brilliant, a model of how to do good intellectual history.” Another writes, “It is methodologically sound, informed by both intimate knowledge of the texts on which it is based and the broad range of scholarship on them and on the theme of medieval Virgilianism in general,” and a third comments, “Haynes notes that, while the influence of Virgil on the vernacular has been well-studied, the web of interpretation, commentary, and reception in which medieval (and early modern) Latin epics are embedded, has not been well-explored. The dissertation does a great job of showing why such connections matter. … The dissertation entirely makes its case that there is a huge gap in our understanding of Virgilian reception.”
Since Justin Haynes is not able to receive the award in person, his co-supervisors, John Magee and David Townsend, will accept it in his stead.”
On the picture: Jill, left, David (holding the award) and John
Justin Haynes has a one-year lecturer position teaching classes in postclassical Latin and the reception of the classics for the Classics department at UCLA.
Also congratulations to the recently married Justin!