Four Women Scholars Win Book Awards

Beth Plummer, an associate professor of history at Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green, was recently presented with the Gerald Strauss Prize in Reformation History at the annual meeting of the Sixteenth Century Society. Dr. Plummer was recognized for her book From Priest’s Whore to Pastor’s Wife: Clerical Marriage and the Process of Reform in the Early German Reformation (Ashgate Publishing, 2012).

Professor Plummer has been on the faculty at Western Kentucky University since 2003. She is a graduate of the University of Rochester in New York and holds a master’s degree and a Ph.D. from the University of Virginia.

Teresa Bergman, an associate professor of communication at the University of the Pacific in Stockton, California, has been selected to receive the Jane Jacobs Urban Communication Book Award from the National Communication Association. She is being honored for her book Exhibiting Patriotism: Creating and Contesting Interpretations of American Historic Sights (Left Coast Press, 2013).

Dr. Bergman is a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley. She holds a master’s degree from San Francisco State University and a Ph.D. in American cultural and film studies from the University of California at Davis.

Jocelyn Boryczka, an associate professor of politics at Fairfield University in Connecticut, and Elizabeth Petrino, an associate professor of English at Fairfield University, are sharing the 2013 Alpha Sigma Nu Book Award. The Alpha Sigma Nu Books Awards honor scholarly research produced by academics at Jesuit member institutions. The pair have been honored for their book Jesuit & Feminist Education: Intersections in Teaching and Learning for the Twenty-First Century (Fordham University Press, 2011).

Dr. Boryczka holds a Ph.D. from the City University of New York. She teaches courses on political theory, feminist thought, race, class and gender. She is the author of the book Suspect Citizens: Women, Virtue and Vice in Backlash Politics (Temple University Press, 2012).

Dr. Petrino joined the faculty at Fairfield University in 2000. She previously taught at Louisiana Tech University and Wake Forest University. Dr. Petrino is a graduate of the University at Buffalo, a campus of the State University of New York system, where she majored in English and American literature. She holds a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in nineteenth-century American literature from Cornell University. She is the author of Emily Dickinson and Her Contemporaries: Women’s Verse in America, 1820-1885 (University Press of New England, 1998).