This year’s McRobbie Fellowship was awarded to Sean Tandy, a Ph.D. candidate in classical studies and the current chair of the Medieval Studies Graduate Student Association, at the Medieval Studies Fall reception in September of 2016. The McRobbie Fellowship is made possible by a generous gift by President Michael McRobbie and his family in memory of Andrea McRobbie's interest in medieval studies and is designated to honor an advanced graduate student engaged in scholarship in medieval history, specifically some aspect of its social history or some theme in medieval social history related to its art, philosophy or literature.
A scholar of Greek and Latin with interests in Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages, Sean Tandy is completing a dissertation entitled, Carmina Qui Quondam: Poetry and Elite Roman Identity in Ostrogothic Italy, which examines the role that poetic composition played in the social and political life of the sixthcentury kingdom. As the selection committee noted, Tandy’s approach to this material is innovative in how it brings together formal and historical considerations. His project explores the ways in which the formal and generic choices of these writers had significant p