UNLV English Professor John Bowers, who last year won a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship, now has received two more distinguished awards -- one sending him to Italy to work on his next book and another allowing him to do research this spring at England's Oxford University.
Bowers, a medieval literature expert who has been a member of the faculty since 1987, has received both a Rockefeller Bellagio Fellowship and a Visiting Research Fellowship at Merton College, Oxford.
"To say I am delighted and honored to receive these two international awards is a vast understatement," Bowers said. "Coming on top of the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Bellagio and Oxford awards represent a true embarrassment of riches."
Jim Frey, dean of UNLV's College of Liberal Arts, which houses the English department, said, "These awards testify to the fact that Dr. Bowers is an accomplished scholar who has garnered a national and international reputation for his studies of medieval literature. He is also an outstanding teacher and university citizen.
"These are prestigious awards that are rarely distributed to scholars outside of the Ivy League and more established, larger programs," Frey said. "Dr. Bowers' record is truly exceptional and brings UNLV and the College of Liberal Arts into the company of America's finest institutions."
The Rockefeller Bellagio Fellowship allowed Bowers to become a resident fellow at the Bellagio Study Center in Italy for a month this past fall. The center, housed in a historic villa overlooking Lake Como, hosts 16 fellows at a time. While there, they work on their projects in a supportive community of artists, scholars, and scientists.
Bowers spent his time there working on his new book, Chaucer and Langland: Antagonistic Traditions, and returned home with a 450-page draft.
Others there at the same time included the composer Richard Danielpour, who was completing a cello concerto that will have its premier by Yo-Yo Ma with the New York Philharmonic. The writer Lynn Freed was working on a novel based on her short stories previously published in The New Yorker, and Dr. Max Essex, director of the Harvard AIDS Institute, was updating his book AIDS in Africa.
The Visiting Research Fellowship will take Bowers to Oxford's Merton College for a two-month period beginning in mid-April. These fellowships allow only two international scholars to come for the academic term, enjoy full faculty membership, and pursue an independent research project without any teaching obligations.
While in England, Bowers, who previously studied at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar in the 1970s, will pursue manuscript research in libraries in London and Cambridge as well as Oxford.
Bowers, who is on sabbatical from UNLV this academic year, will resume teaching duties at the university this fall. He is previously the recipient of the Nevada Regents' Teaching Award.
Earlier this year his latest book, The Politics of 'Pearl': Court Poetry in the Age of Richard II, was published in Cambridge, England.
Bowers' latest scholarly article, "Chaucer After Smithfield: From Postcolonial Writer to Imperialist Author," was published last year in the cutting-edge collection The Postcolonial Middle Ages.
He is the sole author of the books The Crisis of Will in 'Piers Plowman' and The Canterbury Tales: Fifteenth-Century Continuations and Additions. He has also published more than two dozen scholarly articles on authors from St. Augustine to Shakespeare.
