Dietz Prize awarded for ‘Early Responses to Renaissance Drama’

Dietz Prize awarded for ‘Early Responses to Renaissance Drama’
Award honors Rice professor’s teaching passion

BY JESSICA STARK
Rice News staff

The third annual Elizabeth Dietz Prize for the best book published in early modern studies was recently awarded to Charles C. Whitney for “Early Responses to Renaissance Drama.” Whitney’s book, published by Cambridge University Press, was selected from about 200 qualifying publications.

The competition’s judges reported that Whitney’s book, the first full-length investigation of early responses to English Renaissance drama, gives a richly nuanced account of the contemporary experience of playgoing in early modern England. In this study, old compilations of early modern dramatic allusions provide the surprising key to a new understanding of pre-1660 reception.

Whitney teaches English literature at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He will be presented with the award in late December at a ceremony hosted by SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 during the Modern Language Association annual meeting in San Francisco. SEL, a quarterly journal published by Rice University, administers the award on behalf of the dean of Humanities and the Department of English at Rice.

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 and executive editor of SEL. “Her colleagues here at Rice hope the Dietz Prize will embody her virtues and continue to exemplify them for future generations.”

The judges of this year’s Dietz Prize were Catherine Gimelli Martin, the Dunavant Professor in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Memphis; Peter Platt, professor of English at Barnard College in New York; and Stephen Greenblatt, the Cogan University Professor in the Department of English and American Literature and Language at Harvard University. 

Previous winners were Zachary Lesser, an assistant professor of English literature at the University of Pennsylvania, and Robert Watson, professor of English and associate vice provost at the University of California, Los Angeles.