English Graduate Student Receives James J. Hudson Doctoral Award in the Humanities

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Christopher Borntrager

Christopher Borntrager, doctoral candidate in the Department of English, has received one of the 2021-2022 James J. Hudson Doctoral Awards in the Humanities from the Graduate School and International Education.

Each award is for $1,500 and given to a department-nominated graduate student in comparative literature and cultural studies, English, history, or philosophy, who has only their dissertation left to write and defend and who plans to graduate in the coming year.

The award was established in 1986 in memory of James J. Hudson, a longtime professor of history and former dean of the U of A Graduate School.

Borntrager's area of specialization is rhetoric and composition, and his dissertation project will focus on discourses on technology and how they change over time.

He plans to apply the funds to savings, in preparation for jumping into an uncertain academic job market. 

"I'm honored to have been selected," Borntrager said. "This award will give us a little more peace of mind in an uncertain time."

Borntrager's dissertation committee is made up of Elías Domínguez Barajas (director), Sean Connors, Chris Goering and Adam Pope.

Domínguez Barajas said that Borntrager's dissertation project "promises to be a significant contribution in the fields of rhetoric studies and discourse analysis, particularly at a time when we need to understand more fully how media ideologies are fashioned, channeled, leveraged and perpetuated to further particular values and policies.

"Chris' dissertation trains the discursive analysis lens on the way that a particular K-12 school district implements particular media ideologies to further its technological agenda, something that has a clear impact, not only on an entire generation of students, but also on all of the school district's stakeholders," he added. 

"I congratulate Chris on this well-deserved honor, and I'm glad to see that the awards committee saw fit to provide the support that will help Chris complete such important work."