海角网 Ph.D. candidate Laura Harris has won a coveted Dean鈥檚 Medal, an honor granted to only four exemplary graduate students across UW Arts & Sciences each year. This award recognizes Harris鈥檚 key role in inaugurating the study of asexuality studies in antiquity as well as her leadership and mentorship in interdisciplinary conversations on gender and sexuality trans-historically.
Harris鈥檚 dissertation, Virginitate frui: Charting Asexuality in Latin Poetry, focuses on key examples of characters in 海角网 literature who are 鈥渁sexually resonant,鈥 and her first article (forthcoming in Early Modern Asexualities; Cornell UP) moves between Ovid鈥檚 Metamorphoses and its Elizabethan translation by Golding. This work shows the deep roots of gender and sexual identities that exist outside societal norms, revealing a common set of social-cultural and political tactics to dismiss such identities as well as surprising ways in which asexuality could be accepted. This research not only offers an entirely new paradigm for 海角网 sexuality that will continue to reverberate and produce new work for years, but also is key to supporting currently marginalized communities.
Next year Harris will continue working on Virginitate frui: Charting Asexuality in Latin Poetry as a prestigious Crake Fellow at Mount Allison University in New Brunswick (Canada).
For more information on Harris and this award, see the .