Claire Hurley, a third year PhD student in the School of English, has been awarded this year’s Christine and Ian Bolt scholarship. [1] The scholarship was set up in memory of Christine Bolt, Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Kent, by her husband, and supports a sustained period of research in America.
Claire used the funding to carry out archival and ‘field’ research for her PhD thesis which is on four twentieth-century American women poets: Gertrude Stein, Lorine Niedecker, Barbara Guest and Susan Howe. The research considers the site-specific nature of their poetry and the immediate spaces in which poems were composed. The £5000 scholarship enabled her to spend time consulting the archival materials of the poets. She spent the month of July at the Mandeville Special Collections Library, at the University of California, San Diego, to consult the Susan Howe Archive and then visited the Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscript Library at Yale, to explore the papers of Gertrude Stein.
Claire commented: “Being awarded the scholarship has been invaluable for my doctoral research, as it has enabled me to consult with on-site archival materials in the US, as well as visit the physical sites where poem-making took place, for example I was able to visit Lake George (pictured) for ‘field’ research, the location where Susan Howe wrote the poem ‘Thorow’.”
Claire has also been awarded a graduate fellowship at the University of Texas, which will allow her an opportunity to consult the Niedecker archive housed in Texas.