Congratulations to our Loras College English Program senior award winners:
- Sarah Landerholm (’21), winner of the Bauerly-Roseliep Scholarship for best creative writer and literary scholar;
- Catherine Seng (’21), winner of the Lehner Award for Future English Teachers.
Sarah, from Rockton, Ill., wrote a creative nonfiction thesis titled “On Recursion,” which looks at the concept of cyclical time through personal narrative and cultural studies. Her Literature Capstone was titled, “Resistance, Resilience, & Retreat: Reading Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony in Light of Strategic Essentialism.” A key influence on her Loras English experience, she writes, was the “Literature of Resistance/Oppression course that I took with Dr. (Andy) Auge (’78) in the fall of 2019. The topics and works discussed in that class are among the most formative and impactful of my English experience at Loras, to the extent that the final essay that I wrote for that class prompted my Capstone thesis.” Sarah plans to take a gap year to work before pursuing grad school.
Catherine, from Houston, Texas, wrote a Literature Capstone paper titled “Confronting the Ideology of Racial Superiority Through Richard Wright’s Native Son and Angie Thomas’ The Hate U Give.” Her favorite Loras English memory was “the collaboration that took place with my professors and fellow classmates during the Capstone process.” Catherine will be Student Teaching this spring at Hempstead High School in Dubuque.
The Bauerly-Roseliep scholarship is named after Professor Emerita Dr. Donna Bauerly, an innovative professor who taught at Loras from 1971-2007, and Fr. Raymond Roseliep, who taught at Loras from 1946 to 1966 and was an internationally acclaimed haikuist who deeply influenced the lives of student writers, many of whom went on to become writers themselves. The Lehner Award for Future English Teachers is named after Dr. Frank Lehner, who taught at Loras from 1955 through the early 1980s. Dr. Lehner’s specialties were 17th/18th Century British Literature and Literary Criticism.
