Cassandra Nelson selected as an NEH Summer Scholar
Cassandra Nelson, an Editorial Institute alumna and current PhD candidate at Harvard University, has been selected as an NEH Summer Scholar to attend one of thirty seminars and institutes supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Nelson will participate in an institute entitled, “Reconsidering Flannery O’Connor.” The four-week program will be held in Milledgeville, Georgia, at Georgia College & State University, co-directed by Professor Marshall Bruce Gentry of Georgia College & State University and by Professor Robert Donahoo of Sam Houston State University. Summer Scholars will attend ten lectures, participate in seminars conducted by leading O’Connor scholars including Gary Ciuba, Christina Bieber Lake, and Brad Gooch; and spend a week working with materials available only through the Georgia College library.
O’Connor is one of the writers considered in Nelson’s dissertation, which examines the role of religion and screen media in postwar American fiction. An essay adapted from her first dissertation chapter, about O’Connor’s ambivalent attitude toward film and television, received the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers’ Meringoff Nonfiction Award in 2012 and was published in Literary Imagination earlier this year.
Cassandra Nelson received her MA at the Editorial Institute in 2007 and will graduate from Harvard University this May.