KU News Release

Hall Center announces Sias Graduate Fellowship winner for 2009

LAWRENCE — Keri Sanburn Behre, a doctoral student in English at the University of Kansas, is the winner of the Richard and Jeannette Sias Graduate Fellowship in the Humanities for 2009-10. She will spend a year in residence at the Hall Center for the Humanities working on her dissertation, “Appetite and Authority on the Early Modern English Stage.”

“This is such an amazing opportunity, and I am very honored,” Behre said.

Her excitement reflected the rare gift this prestigious fellowship offers to a single graduate student in the humanities each year: the opportunity to spend an entire academic year focused on nothing but dissertation research and writing.

“I look forward to immersing myself in research this fall and, of course, to completing my dissertation by the end of the fellowship term,” Behre said.

Her dissertation project examines the representation and regulation of bodies in late 16th and early 17th century English drama, seeking new understandings of how early modern identities were established and maintained through food.

Behre earned a bachelor’s in English language and literature from Wichita State University in 2000 and a master’s in English literature from Florida State University in 2003. She is the daughter of Maggie Iuen and David Sanburn of Wichita and a graduate of Maize High School.

The Sias fellowship is not her first honor. Behre is the 2008 recipient of the Goldie L. Case Award for Excellence in the Study of Literature and a winner of the Carlin Outstanding Graduate Teaching Assistant Award.

Behre will be the fourth doctoral student supported by the gift from Richard and Jeannette Sias. Monique Laney, a doctoral student in American studies, is the current Sias fellow.

The goal of the Richard and Jeannette Sias Graduate Fellowship is to allow KU humanities doctoral students whose studies include an international emphasis to expand their experiences beyond a single disciplinary focus in both research and professional training. The fellowship is intended to produce humanities scholars whose vision for their careers includes a continued commitment to interdisciplinary endeavors and a desire to share that commitment with the world outside of the academy.

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