English Professor Michael Drout wins McIntosh Fellowship to support scholarship on medieval poetry

English Professor Michael Drout, a nationally known medievalist and J.R.R. Tolkien scholar, has been selected as a Millicent C. McIntosh Fellow for 2006 by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation. The $15,000 award will support Drout's continuing scholarship on tenth century English literature.

The McIntosh Fellowships are awarded to recently tenured humanities faculty "who demonstrate a deep commitment to excellent teaching and scholarship ... and who are exceptional citizens of their academic community," according to the Woodrow Wilson Foundation. The awards are intended to provide outstanding young faculty with the time and resources needed to continue their scholarly work at a career juncture when professional and personal responsibilities present many competing challenges.

One of six McIntosh Fellows selected this year, Drout is the William C.H. and Elsie D. Prentice Professor of English at Wheaton, where he teaches Old English (Anglo-Saxon), Middle English, medieval literature, fantasy, science fiction and writing. His scholarship on medieval literature combines literary expertise with innovative uses of contemporary information theory and evolutionary biology.

Drout is the author of the recently published book, How Tradition Works, the fruit of 10 years' work. The McIntosh Fellowship will support his work on a sequel, From Tradition to Culture which focuses on the "Exeter Book," a tenth-century codex (manuscript volume) that is the largest single collection of Anglo-Saxon poetry still surviving today.

"My research will investigate the ways that the Exeter Book poems are shaped by tenth-century culture, particularly the 'Benedictine Reform,' in which a small group of monks with strong connections to King Edgar were able to re-shape Anglo-Saxon culture," said Drout. The award will also support Drout's teaching, notably his work with several students who will do independent studies on the Exeter Book in the fall.

In his scholarship, Drout applies 21st century "meme theory" to medieval literature. Memes are discrete units of culture, such as ideas or practices, that can be combined, recombined and transmitted to others--functioning in effect as the "genes" of a culture. The Benedictine monks who compiled the Exeter Book sought to impose a monastic idea of literary tradition on Anglo Saxon poetry; as they did, Drout argues, they also unwittingly replicated non-monastic memes, creating the basic code of what would become a much larger British culture.

"The Fellowship will also allow me to collaborate with Professor Mercedes Salvador of the University of Seville, Spain, the world's leading expert on Anglo-Saxon riddles," Drout said, noting that the final third of the Exeter Book is composed of riddles.

In 2002 Drout published an edition of J.R.R. Tolkien's Beowulf and the Critics, based on an unpublished Tolkien manuscript that Drout discovered in an Oxford, England, library in 1996. The book won the Mythopoeic Society's 2003 Award in Inklings Studies.

Administered by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation and funded by the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, the McIntosh Fellowships were named in honor of Millicent C. McIntosh, the late president of Barnard College and a noted humanist and educator. Ten colleges were invited to participate in the 2006 Fellowship program, and six recipients were named from Wheaton, Austin College, Beloit College and Reed College.