Each year, Library Associates present the Mary Hatch Marshall Essay Award for the best essay written by a graduate student in the humanities at the University. The award, first presented in 2004, honors Mary Hatch Marshall, who in 1948 was the first woman to become a full professor in the College of Liberal Arts at Syracuse University and in 1953 was a co-founder of Library Associates. The award carries a cash prize of $500. This year's winner is Jonathan Singleton, a doctoral student in the English Department in Syracuse University's College of Arts and Sciences. His winning essay is titled “Religion, Radicalism, and Sympathetic Reading in Gaskell’s Mary Barton.”

 

Mary Marshall

                  Mary Hatch Marshall – a native of Scarborough, N.Y., a hamlet in Westchester County, and the daughter of a Presbyterian minister and professor – graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Vassar College in 1924 and earned her Ph.D. in English from Yale University in 1932.

                  After conducting research in medieval drama as a Guggenheim Fellow in 1945 and 1946, she joined the faculty of Syracuse University in 1948 as an English professor. Marshall became the first woman at Syracuse to achieve the rank of full professor in the College of Liberal Arts (today the College of Arts and Sciences) and held the Jesse Truesdell Peck Chair in English literature beginning in 1952. She also helped to establish the Honors Program and served as its first director.

                 

                  She was devoted to the library’s essential role in the academic community. “The library was at the center of university life and the center of my life,” she said. “I was horrified at the limitations of its usefulness when I arrived at SU and saw the need to increase its budget. I got on the library committee because I was vocal . . . . Chancellor (William P.) Tolley said I harassed him until he built a new library.” Ernest Stevenson Bird Library opened in 1972.

                 Marshall retired from full time teaching in 1970 and was granted emeritus status, then promptly began a second career in adult education. She offered courses through the Humanistic Studies Center at University College until 1993. Her love of teaching had bloomed into a career that lasted 69 years.

                 Chancellor Melvin A. Eggers established the Chancellor's Citation for Academic Achievement in 1979 to recognize outstanding contributions in scholarship, research, teaching and creative work. Marshall received a Chancellor’s Citation in 1980, one of many honors and awards she was given for her service to the University and the Syracuse. In 1956 she received the Post Standard Award for Distinguished Service to the Syracuse University Library and in 1989 she became the third recipient of the University’s Outstanding Teacher of the Year Award.

                  Mary Marshall spent the last months of her life at her home on Sumner Avenue in Syracuse, supported by Hospice of Central New York and a large circle of loving friends and family. She died September 25, 2000, at age 97.

 

The Mary Hatch Marshall Essay Award

After Mary Hatch Marshall’s death, Library Associates wanted to acknowledge her deep commitment to the organization since its founding. The 100th anniversary of Mary’s birth and the 50th anniversary of Library Associates in 2003 provided the opportunity to establish the Mary Hatch Marshall Essay Award as a permanent memorial that would connect her passions for literature and for the Library. Members of Library Associates, Mary’s friends and family, the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, and the Central New York Community Foundation all contributed to the endowment that funds this annual award for the best essay written by a graduate student in the humanities at Syracuse University.

Eligible for the cash prize are part time and full time students from the following humanities departments and programs: African American Studies; English; Fine Arts; Languages Literatures, and Linguistics; Latino Latin American Studies; Religion; Philosophy; the Writing Program; and the Women’s Studies Program. Nominations are submitted by each of these programs to a faculty panel selected to judge the essays.

 

 

Award winners

2004 (two winners)

Stephanie Kuhlman, master’s student, Fine Arts Department

Amy Robillard, Composition and Cultural Rhetoric Doctoral Program

2005

Jonathan Singleton, master’s student, English Department

Essay title: “ ‘Reasonable Christianity’ in The Moonstone and at Cawnpore: The Religion of Empire”

2006

Cordell M. Waldron, doctoral student, Religion Department

Essay title: “Jeweled Chariots: The Metaphor of Motion in Japanese Buddhist Literature and Practice”

2007

Jonathan Singleton, doctoral student, English Department

Essay title: “Religious Nationalism in Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the National Era”

2008

Jessica Kuskey, doctoral student, English Department

Essay title: “Thomas Carlyle’s ‘Pig Philosophy’ and Charles Dickens’s ‘Pip-Squeaker’: The Image of the Pig on in Victorian Economics”

2009

Jonathan Singleton, doctoral student, English Department

Essay title: “Religion, Radicalism, and Sympathetic Reading in Gaskell’s Mary Barton”