Each academic year, the Library honors the very best undergraduate papers from courses across campus with the Charlene Conrad Liebau Library Prize for Undergraduate Research. This is the second in a series of posts that highlight the fantastic work of each of our 2015 prize winners.
Samuel Diener (’15), who entered the doctoral program in English at Harvard this Fall, dug deep into the rare book collections in the Bancroft Library as well as the library-licensed Eighteenth-Century Collections Online database to research his prize-winning English H195 paper, Modes of Fictionality in the Works of Daniel Defoe and Captain Charles Johnson. Diener also took advantage of a Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship to travel to archives on the east coast in his exploration of the fictional poetics of the early 1720s. His advisor, Dr. Janet Sorensen, noted that “his integration of difficult theoretical questions with top-notch archival work is utterly remarkable for an undergraduate.”
An exhibit highlighting Diener’s work is on display now in the Charlene Conrad Leibau Library Prize for Undergraduate Research display case on the second floor of Doe Library. The exhibit was designed by Aisha Hamilton and curated by Monica Singh.