2011-2012 Awards and Appointments

IPSY Principal Investigator, Professor Joseph Roach, was elected as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Paige McGinley, Assistant Professor of Theater Studies and American Studies and PSWG member, won the 2011 Poorvu Family Award for Interdisciplinary Teaching in Yale College.  

Daniel Larham, PhD, PSWG member and Lecturer in Theatre Studies, has been appointed Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Theatre Studies program.

Christopher Grobe, PhD, former PSWG Co-Convener and currently Assistant Professor of English at Amherst College, won the 2012 Prize for the Best Dissertation in English Language and Literature at Yale: “Performing Confession:  Poetry, Performance and New Media since 1959” 

The citation reads:  “Christopher Grobe’s ambitious dissertation studies the prevalence of confession in American culture, high and low, since the 1960s.  He argues that, far from transparent personal expression, confession is best understood–in genres such as confessional poetry, performance art, the theatrical monologue, and reality television–as a performance of the self.  The project is a stirring demonstration of what literary studies, performance studies, and media studies can accomplish together.” 

Lynda Paul, PhD, former PSWG Co-Convener, has been appointed Andrew W. Mellon Interdisciplinary Postdoctoral Fellow at Yale for 2012-2014  following the completion of her dissertation in the Department of Music, titled:  “Sonic Vegas:  Live Virtuality and the Cirque du Soleil.”

James “Jamie” O’Leary, PhD, PSWG Member, was recognized at the GSAS Commencement Convocation as a graduating winner of a Prize Teaching Fellowship (2009-2010).  Recently appointed Assistant Professor of Music at the Oberlin Conservatory, he completed his dissertation in the Department of Music (2012):  “Broadway Highbrow:  Discourse and Politics of the American Musical, 1943-1946.”

Postdoctoral Fellow and PSWG Co-Convener Julia Fawcett has been appointed Assistant Professor of English at Ryerson University in Toronto.  We thank her for her formative contributions to IPSY in its first year, and we wish her the best, saying, and she taught us,  “The higher the hair, the closer to God.”