Recognizing Richard Aquila for translating the second volume of Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Presentation.

Urmila Seshagiri, assistant professor in English, will hold the department’s Allen Carroll Distinguished Teaching Professor for the next two academic years.

Stanton B. Garner Jr., professor of drama in the English Department and co-editor of the new Norton Anthology of Drama, has been named a UT Distinguished Professor of the Humanities.

Jered Sprecher, assistant professor in the School of Art, has been chosen for a 2009 John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, one of the most prestigious awards in arts, humanities and sciences. Sprecher will use his grant to free up time and assist with the costs of creating a series of large-scale paintings.

Erec R. Koch, professor of French and head of the Modern Foreign Languages and Literatures department, delivered an invited lecture at the doctoral seminar on the epistolary genre in seventeenth-century France, Centre d’étude de la langue et la littérature françaises des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles, Université Paris-Sorbonne/CNRS. Koch discussed the interrelation of philosophy and literature in philosopher René Descartes’ correspondence with Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia.