George Mills Harper Graduate Student Travel Fund Award 

In honor of past president George Mills Harper, SAMLA maintains the Harper Fund to provide graduate students with travel funds to attend the annual conference.

Professor Harper’s academic career spanned over 50 years, and he provided exceptional leadership and service to the association. From his early years on the family farm in the Ozarks to his matriculation from Culver-Stockton College to UNC-Chapel Hill to his later chairmanship of the English Department at Florida State University, Harper concentrated his writing and research efforts in Irish studies, particularly focusing on W. B. Yeats. In 1981, Dr. Harper received an honorary doctorate from Trinity College Dublin in recognition for his critical work in studying Yeats and the occult.

Eligibility Requirements

• To be eligible to receive this award, graduate students must: 1) be presenting as part of a session/panel at the current year's conference, 2) establish or renew their SAMLA membership, 3) register for the conference.
• Winners of the Harper Fund Award must attend the conference in order to receive award funds. Winners who decide not to attend should notify SAMLA so we can award the funds to another student. 

Applications for SAMLA 93 will open in Spring 2021.

 2020 Award Winners

Nathan Fleeson
University of Georgia
“C.S. Lewis’s Reimagining of the Judas Scene in The Voyage of St. Brendan”

Aviv Hilbig-Bokaer
New York University
“A Public Diagnosis: Destabilizing Scandal, Anxiety, and Medicine in Klaus Mann’s Barred Window”

Madison Mainwaring
Yale University
“Gender Politics and Authorship on the Paris Opera Stage, 1830-1870”

Jessie McCrary 
Georgia State University
“Construction of ‘Self’ Using Foucault’s Lectures at the Collège de France and Implications and Use in Composition Theory”

Tessa Nunn
Duke University
“Consent to Waltz in Novels of George Sand and Marie d’Agoult”