Dr. Anne Hardin has established the Benjamin Franklin V Graduate English Endowed Fund, which will provide summer financial support for some graduate students to complete their dissertations.
The University of South Carolina Department of English is delighted to announce that Dr. Anne Hardin has established the Benjamin Franklin V Graduate English Endowed Fund, which will provide summer financial support for some graduate students to complete their dissertations. This award will make a tremendous difference in the recipients' lives.
Brian Glavey, the Associate Chair of English, explains that “writing a dissertation takes an extraordinary amount of diligence, time, and effort. It can be a daunting exercise, especially when a student is also carving out time to teach classes and work on other projects. This is why the summer can be such a profoundly productive time and why this award will make such a big difference for its recipients, who will be able to focus their energies on their writing.”
Distinguished Professor of English, Emeritus, at the University, Professor Franklin is a scholar of wide-ranging expertise who has also taught abroad: at the University of Athens, Greece; the University of Helsinki, Finland; and the University of Hannover, Germany. He has written extensively about American literature from the seventeenth (John Cotton, Leonard Hoar), eighteenth (Mather Byles, Mercy Otis Warren), nineteenth (Nathaniel Hawthorne), and twentieth (Wambly Bald, Anais Nin) centuries. He has collected the writings of the Minor Connecticut Wits, edited a collection of essays about the printers, publishers, and booksellers active in Boston through 1800, and wrote Research Guide to American Literature: Colonial Literature, 1607-1776. Most recently, he has written five books about jazz. It is through this work that he met Dr. Hardin. As editor of the International Trumpet Guild Journal, she invited Franklin to publish an essay on trumpeter Miles Davis in 1991. Decades later she granted him permission to reprint it in a compilation of his jazz writings. Impressed with his work, she offered to publish the book through her Polaris-Press, which issued not only his The Miraculous Art of Jazz but also his Jazz from Main Street to Kecskemét.
Explaining her decision to establish this fund for graduate students in Franklin's name, Hardin notes that “Ben has been a scholar his entire career, including in retirement. My path was different. I was a middle school band director and a professional editor at the same time. Ever the instructor, Ben teaches me about various topics. When collaborating on projects, we’re no longer surprised when we have the same idea at the same time. Graduate students who benefit from the Benjamin Franklin V Endowed Fund deserve such a fine model as he.”