2014/15 Library Prize Winner: Katherine Gray

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 third in a series of posts that highlight the fantastic work of each of our 2015 prize winners.

Katherine Gray’s paper Johanna Jachmann-Wagner’s Lohengrin: Vocal Philology at the Jean Gray Hargrove Library, provides a close reading of notes penciled in an 1851 edition of Richard Wagner’s opera Lohengrin during a singing lesson that took place in 1884. Her Music 179 professor, Dr James Q Davies, noted in Fiat Lux that Gray’s research involved “raiding the Hargrove shelves for the latest secondary literature on Wagner, interlibrary loans when local collections failed, and extensive online primary research . . . this is research at the intersection of voice studies, gender studies, opera studies, biography, sociology, performance practice research, historical philology, historical musicology, and much more. The findings have huge potential.”

Applications for the 2015/16 prizes will be accepted between December 4, 2015 and April 14, 2016.