COLLEGE HONORS AND UNIVERSITY AWARDS
BYU Humanities College Meeting 2014
HUMANITIES PROFESSORSHIPS AND FELLOWSHIPS Stanley V. Benfell, Humanities Professor of Comparative Literature
Stanley Benfell has taught comparative literature at BYU since 1994. A specialist in medieval and Renaissance literature from England, Italy, and France, he enjoys teaching GE courses and has developed BYU’s first world literature two-semester survey. Currently on assignment on his third study abroad program at the London Centre, he is the recipient of the Alcuin award and Honors Professor of the Year. His book, The Biblical Dante (University of Toronto Press 2011), argues for Dante’s intimate engagement with the Bible in The Divine Comedy. In addition to recent articles on Dante’s moral philosophy, his current research explores Renaissance comedy and skepticism. He is the former chair of the Department of Humanities, Classics, and Comparative Literature as well as the former director of European Studies at BYU. Blair E. Bateman, Humanities Center Fellow
Blair Bateman is a native of Salt Lake City. He graduated from BYU with BAs in music and Portuguese and later an MA in Portuguese. He holds a PhD in Curriculum and Instruction, Second Languages and Cultures Education from the University of Minnesota. Professor Bateman has taught Portuguese and Spanish at the university and high school levels, and has taught workshops in several locations around the country on the teaching of culture in foreign language classes. His other research interests include foreign language teacher education in general and especially immersion education. Brian R. Roberts, Humanities Center Fellow
After growing up in Hawai’i, Indonesia, and Tennessee, Brian Roberts received a PhD in English from the University of Virginia in 2008. His scholarship and teaching focus on American studies, African American and black diasporan literature and culture, modernism/modernity, archipelagic studies, and literature and diplomacy. His first book—Artistic Ambassadors: Literary and International Representation of the New Negro Era (University of Virginia Press, 2013)—examines the literary and diplomatic performances of African American writers who traveled as US diplomats during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Tracing the interrelated spheres of racial, aesthetic, and international representation, Artistic Ambassadors brings the literary and diplomatic dossiers of famous figures such as Frederick Douglass and James Weldon Johnson into dialogue with the work of lesser-known black writer-diplomats of the New Negro era. The project further demonstrates how historical access to New Negro literary and cultural investments in official US diplomacy is crucial to understanding quasi-diplomatic moments in African American and
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