KU News Release

Two recent graduates honored for outstanding doctoral dissertations

LAWRENCE — Two University of Kansas graduates earned prizes for outstanding dissertations at the doctoral hooding ceremony May 17 in the Lied Center.

Michelle Yvonne Moseley-Christian of Blacksburg, Va., won the $1,000 Dorothy Haglund Prize for her dissertation in art history, “Seventeenth-Century Dutch and Flemish Genre-Portraiture.”

Liza Marie Holeski of Madison, Wis., and Rio Grande, Ohio, won the $1,250 Marnie and Bill Argersinger Award for her dissertation in ecology and evolutionary biology, “Quantitative Trait Evolution in Mimulus Guttatus (Yellow Monkey Flower).”

Both winners are summer 2007 graduates and members of the Class of 2008. Their names will be added to plaques in the Kansas Union that honor past award recipients.

Moseley-Christian is an assistant professor of art history at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Va. She earned a bachelor’s degree in 1996 and a master’s degree in 2000, both from the University of Alabama.

Holeski is a post-doctoral research associate in entomology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She received a master’s degree in ecology and evolutionary biology at KU and a bachelor’s degree from St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minn., in 2001. She is the daughter of Paul and Sue Holeski of Rio Grande, Ohio.

The Haglund prize was established in 1979 by former vice chancellor and dean William J. Argersinger Jr. and his wife, Marnie, and their friends to honor the late Dorothy Haglund, who was director of graduate admissions and records and assistant dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences from 1940 until her retirement in 1983.

In 1992, the Argersingers established a fund to provide an additional dissertation prize. Before a dissertation may be nominated for either prize, students must pass their dissertation defenses with honors.

The Office of Research and Graduate Studies announced the awards. Both prizes were established through KU Endowment, the independent, nonprofit organization serving as the official fundraising and fund-management organization for KU. Founded in 1891, KU Endowment is the first foundation of its kind at a U.S. public university.

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