UMass Amherst English Professor Stephen Harris Awarded Fulbright Distinguished Research Chair in Arts and Social Sciences

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AMHERST, Mass. – Stephen Harris, professor in the department of English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, has been awarded a Fulbright Distinguished Research Chair in Arts and Social Sciences for North America through Fulbright Canada. Harris will spend the 2018-19 academic year at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario.

The Canada-U.S. Fulbright Program operates on the principle of reciprocal exchange and provides the opportunity for outstanding American scholars to lecture and/or conduct research in Canada. Harris’s award issues through a partnership between Fulbright Canada and Carleton University, which have established dedicated research chairs in support of educational programming, teaching and research. The awards allow American scholars and researchers to spend one academic year working in a targeted area of academic inquiry. Four chairs are appointed annually in the areas of arts and sciences, entrepreneurship, environmental science, and public affairs in North America: society, policy, media.

Working in the area of natural language processing, Harris will spend his Fulbright year developing computer tools to investigate literary language (metaphor, simile, and analogy) and literary form in the earliest stages of the English language, with a special focus on noun phrases. When he returns to UMass Amherst in 2019, he will offer a course on data science for the humanities.

Harris specializes in Old English, medieval Latin poetry, early medieval Christianity and historical linguistics. He sits on the executive board of the Old English Group of the Modern Language Association, the executive board of the MLA Old Norse Group, and the board of the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists. He is the editor of the journal Old English Newsletter, and director of Old English Publications LLC, whose volumes include the first English translation of “Ancient Germanic Literatures” by Jorge Luis Borges, with the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies.

Harris has previously been awarded grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Mellon Foundation.

A graduate of Bishop’s University in Sherbrooke, Quebec, Harris holds an M.A. from the University of Ottawa and a Ph.D. from Loyola University Chicago.