Caroline Maun receives 2014 Career Development Chair Award

Associate Professor Caroline Maun has received a 2014Career Development Chair Award. Career Development Chairs are awarded to as many as seven recently tenured faculty as part of the university's program to support the teaching and research endeavors of faculty members in the developmental stages of their scholarly careers. Since 1982, 217 university faculty members have held Career Development Chairs. The Career Development Chairs were established by generous grants to the Wayne State Fund and provide recipients financial support, encouragement and recognition at a critical time in their careers.

Dr. Maun received her award at the WSU Academic Recognition Ceremony on April 24, 2014. According to the program,

Professor Caroline Maun is a distinguished scholar with a research interest in women poets of the modernist era in American literature. As the editor of The Collected Poems of Evelyn Scott (National Poetry Foundation, University of Maine Press) and the author of the monograph, Mosaic of Fire: The Work of Lola Ridge, Evelyn Scott, Charlotte Wilder, and Kay Boyle, Maun provided biographical criticism that focused on the social network of these writers and the ways in which they mutually supported their professional and personal efforts. These works have been commended for their approach, which allows her to uncover the true value of poems by women who have not received the attention they deserve in the canon of modern American poetry. With the Career Development Chair, Maun will work on a scholarly monograph that will recover the work of Wilder, Ridge, Bogan and Scott as writers who varied over the course of their careers in their responses to the dominant trend toward avant garde literary
practices for a variety of psychological, sociocultural and political motives. This work will argue that "the interaction of the traditional and the experimental must be considered within the socio-historical contexts of gender, taking into consideration attitudes toward women writers of the period as well as changing social roles and expectations for women in the post-World War I decades." Maun has established a distinguished record as a scholar and this award will allow her to complete the monograph, which will contribute to the field and her stature in it.