Congratulations to Dr. Paul Lauter on receiving the Francis Andrew March Award! The full announcement from the Winter 2017 MLA Newsletter appears below.

The ADE Executive Committee is delighted to name Paul Lauter the recipient of the twenty-sixth Francis Andrew March Award. He will receive the award at the MLA Annual Convention’s awards ceremony in New York City on 6 January 2018. Lauter recently retired from Trinity College (Connecticut), where he was the Allan K. and Gwendolyn Miles Smith Professor of Literature and also served terms as director of American studies and chair of the English department. He has served as president of the American Studies Association and is the founding general editor of the influential Heath Anthology of American Literature, which powerfully redirected the field toward a more historicized, inclusive, and self-aware representation of the many voices and origins of American literature. He is also the author or editor of several books, including From Walden Pond to Jurassic Park: Activism, Culture, and American Studies and, most recently, A History of American Working-Class Literature. During 1964 and 1965 he worked in freedom schools in Mississippi and in Roosevelt University’s Upward Bound program, and in 1967 he became director of the first community school project in the nation, at Adams-Morgan in Washington, DC. In 1972, he resumed his teaching career at the State University of New York, Old Westbury, an institution that especially served underrepresented groups such as black and Latino students and older women. He was one of the founding editors of the Feminist Press and of the journal Radical Teacher. He has been a longtime and active member of the MLA, serving on the Delegate Assembly (1978–80), the Committee on Academic Freedom and Professional Rights and Responsibilities (1988–91), the Joint Committee on Governance (1989), the Elections Committee (1998–99), and the ADE Executive Committee (2006–08). Lauter has forged a powerful complementarity between his social activism and his teaching, and he has been an ambassador for American studies around the world, having shared his expertise in more than twenty-five countries.

The Francis Andrew March Award was established by the ADE Executive Committee in 1984 to honor exceptional service to the profession of English. The award is named for Francis March (1823–1911), professor of English at Lafayette College and the first professor of English in America.