Each year we name a recipient of the Andrea S. McRobbie Fellowship, an award that is made possible by a generous gift by President Michael McRobbie and his family in memory of Andrea S. McRobbie's interest in medieval studies an is designated to honor an advanced graduate studnet engaged in "scholarship in medieval history, specifically some aspect of its social history or some theme in medieval social history." This will be the eleventh year of awarding this fellowship, which we think of as the MVP award for graduate work in medieval studies.
This year's Andrea S. McRobbie Fellowship in Medieval History has been awarded to Stephen Hopkins, who is completing his dissertation in the Department of English and who will begin a tenure-track job as an Anglo-Saxonist at the University of Central Florida in the fall.
Stephen's dissertation, "The Infernal Laboratory: Apocryphal Hermeneutics and Hell in the Medieval North Sea," examines figurations of hell in the apocryphal literatures of the North, arguing that in these texts, hell is "a frontier space of the spiritual imagination." "The Infernal Laboratory" is an ambitious project, with each of the dissertation's four chapters focusing on a different region/language: the first on Old English texts and contexts, the second on Old Norse, the third on Old Irish, and the fourth on Middle Welsh.
The College of Arts