Maine Studies Research and Creativity Awards

Maine Studies Research and Creativity Awards Winners – 2007

The Maine Studies program of the University of Maine is pleased to announce the 2007 winners of the Maine Studies Research and Creativity Awards.  These awards are designed to highlight excellence in Maine-related student scholarship.  Thanks to the generosity of the University of Maine Foundation, the awards come with a $250 prize for the best undergraduate research paper or project and the same for the best graduate paper or project.

This year’s Maine Studies Research Award for graduate work goes to
Phyllis vonHerrlich. Phyllis, who earned the Certificate in Maine Studies as an undergraduate student, is currently enrolled as a Maine Studies Interdisciplinary Degree student. Phyllis’s winning essay is titled “Maine’s Early Landscape Painting – Views of the Village.”  Phyllis is a student of Maine art history who believes that such luminaries as Winslow Homer, the Wyeths and Rockwell Kent, have overshadowed some earlier but equally impressive Maine landscape artists.  In this paper Phyllis analyzes the landscape paintings of Jonathan Fisher, Charles Codman, and Esteria Butler, and concludes that these earlier artists were important, not only in constructing the images of the Maine landscape that the outside world would come to revere, but also in revealing social aspects of Maine’s 19th century village life. Phyllis’s research brings attention and scholarly analysis to these less-known but very important early Maine artists.

This year’s Maine Studies Research Award for undergraduate work goes to two people. Kathy Richards wrote her paper, “Time and Place – Color and Texture” for HTY 210, Maine History, a course offered through ITV.  Kathy took the course from the Guilford ITV site.  Her insightful paper gleans 19th and early 20th century Maine history through the use of newspaper obituaries.  Through her grasp of Maine history and her keen research skills, Kathy was able to tease out the stories of two people and their communities based on the pithy information available in the obituaries, which she wove into the larger historical context using town documents, the U.S. census, organizational histories, and many secondary sources on town and state histories.  Her research demonstrates that we can indeed study the history of Maine’s so-called “voiceless masses” by the careful use of a readily available historical source such as newspaper obituaries.   

Heather Cox shared in the undergraduate research award with her essay on “Eliza Allen, the Mexican War, and the Woman’s Sphere: The Female Volunteer and its Challenge of Social Norms.”  This paper uses as it primary source a 19th century novel, The Female Volunteer, written by Eliza Allen. The paper details the complex twists and turns of the story of Eliza Allen, an Eastport woman who dresses as a man to accompany her lover to the Mexican War in the 1840s.  Despite the fact that the author’s true identity is actually unknown, Heather places this novel in the larger context of the women’s rights movement in Maine.  Eliza Allen’s seemingly bizarre behavior - dressing as a man and joining the army - reflects the many mid-19th c. women who struggled against the prescribed roles that confined women’s behavior to home and hearth.