Department of English doctoral candidate Tate Aldrich was recently selected for an award of the James J. Hudson Doctoral Fellowship in the Humanities for 2024-2025 through the office of the Graduate School and International Education.

Aldrich will begin his fifth year in the English Ph.D. program this fall, and his areas of research include American Transcendental philosophy and 20th-century literary modernism.

The Hudson doctoral award of $1,500 will support Aldrich's work on his dissertation project, tentatively titled "A Transcendental Re-Turn: Literature as Experiential Frontiers for Future Communities."

Aldrich theorizes that relational ethics (or "the ethics of care") unifies the work of the 19th-century American Transcendentalists, providing ways to understand literature and literary discourse as terrain to practice the receptivity, understanding and responsiveness that community-building requires.

Aldrich frames this analysis as an answer to postcritique's question: what good is literature now? He is especially interested in pedagogy, particularly any dialogic mode of instruction that helps us to reimagine our speaking as the process of learning rather than its product.

According to Aldrich, the American Transcendentalists understood that our learning must leave room for the recurring, reparative experiences between us, and our learning must make us worthier of our shared, democratic spaces.

"It is work that fills me with hope, really," Aldrich said, "and proves the necessity — or the power — of idealism in American politics and social reform."

Aldrich plans to defend his dissertation and graduate in the spring of 2025.