Second annual Dietz Prize awarded

Second annual Dietz Prize awarded
‘Back to Nature’ receives the honor

BY JESSICA STARK
Rice News Staff

The second annual Elizabeth Dietz Prize for the best book published in early modern studies has been awarded to Robert Watson, professor in the UCLA Department of English, for his book “Back to Nature: The Green and the Real in the Late Renaissance.”

ELIZABETH DIETZ

This award was created to honor Dietz, who died of cancer in 2005. She was as an assistant professor at Rice who taught courses in 16th- and 17th-century nondramatic literature, visual culture, literary theory and Shakespeare.

“In her short life, Liz forged intense friendships and provided students with shining examples of inspiring teaching and professional responsibility,” said Robert Patten, the Lynette S. Autrey Professor in Humanities. “Her colleagues here at Rice hope the Dietz Prize will embody her virtues and continue to exemplify them for future generations.”

Ranging widely across scholarly disciplines, “Back to Nature” illuminates the response of 17th-century culture, especially English literature, to the way urbanization, capitalism, Protestantism, colonialism, skepticism, empiricism and new technologies conspired to alienate people from both the Earth and reality itself.

The judges were Bruce Boehrer, the Bertram H. Davis Professor of English at Florida Sate University; Patrick Cheney, professor of English and comparative literature at Penn State University; and Sir Frank Kermode, retired from chairs in literature at the University of London and Cambridge University, and the Julian Clarence Levi Professor Emeritus in the Humanities at Columbia University.

The first Dietz prize was awarded to Zachary Lesser, professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, for his book “Renaissance Drama and the Politics of Publication: Reading in the English Book of Trade.”