KU News Release

LAWRENCE — The Hall Center for the Humanities at the University of Kansas has announced the winners of the 2009 Byron Caldwell Smith Book Award.

Laura Mielke, assistant professor of English at KU, won the award for her book, “Moving Encounters: Sympathy and the Indian Question in Antebellum Literature,” published by University of Massachusetts Press in 2008. Don Worster, the Hall Distinguished Professor of American History at KU, won the award for his book, “A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir,” published by Oxford University Press in 2008.

Mielke and Worster will receive their awards and each deliver a lecture at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 24, at the Hall Center Conference Hall. Mielke’s lecture is titled “Beyond Doomed Indians and Crocodile Tears: Reading Literature from the Age of Removal.” Worster’s lecture is titled “John Muir and the Religion of Nature.” The event is open to the public. A book signing and reception will follow.

The award committee provided an enthusiastic endorsement of Mielke’s scholarship. “Laura Mielke has written a superb literary history of Native American-white relations produced in text and spectacle during the American antebellum period. Examining works authored by white and Native Americans alike, she reveals how well these players understood the seemingly insurmountable problem of co-existence and/or acculturation of the Indian to white society.”

Worster’s book also received high praise from the committee. “Donald Worster’s ‘Life of John Muir’ is one more example of Worster’s growing reputation as one of our great living writers of biography. Among the many merits of Worster’s book, one stands out — the author’s effortless placement of Muir’s ideas within the history of the idea of Nature in the West.”

The Byron Caldwell Smith Award was established at the bequest of Kate Stephens, a former KU student and one of KU’s first women professors. As an undergraduate, Stephens learned to love the study of Greek language and literature from Smith. In his name, she established this award, given biennially to an individual who lives or is employed in Kansas and who has written an outstanding book published in the previous two years.