The Karen B. Mann Essay Award in Literature and Film

This award fund has been established to encourage exceptional undergraduate student writing in upper-division British literature, European literature, and Film classes in honor of the scholarship, teaching, and service of Dr. Karen B. Mann. Dr. Mann received her B.A. in English from Northwestern University in 1967, and her Ph.D. in English from the University of Pennsylvania in 1971. She was a faculty member of the Department of English and Journalism at Western Illinois University for 34 years, arriving in 1971 and retiring in 2005. Dr. Mann’s friends, family, and colleagues dedicate this award with admiration of her many gifts and gratitude for her years of service.
A devoted proponent of humanistic study, both within and outside the University, Dr. Mann had a brilliant, nationally-recognized career at WIU. She specialized in nineteenth-century British literature, and published a monograph on George Eliot’s metaphors, entitled The Language that Makes George Eliot’s Fiction (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983). Her scholarship and teaching came to include film studies, focusing especially on the construction of female subjectivity in films that feature time travel and thus entangle past, present, and future in their storytelling. Throughout her career Dr. Mann published essays on both British literature and contemporary film in such acclaimed journals as Criticism, ELH, Film Quarterly, and Studies in English Literature (SEL).
A devoted and exacting teacher, Dr. Mann’s classes bore witness to the power of stories to shape the world around us. Always searching for fresh ways to engage students in the study of literature, Dr. Mann experimented with new models of instruction throughout her long career. She received numerous University-level grants to develop computer-based activities for students to analyze literary texts, first on CD-ROM and then on the web. In addition, she created and carried out innovative programs on general education for incoming freshmen. A consulting editor for the journal College Teaching, Dr. Mann was committed to multicultural education and worked throughout her career at WIU to integrate multicultural educational models into the curriculum at the University. For example, Dr. Mann co-instructed Western’s first Women’s Studies course, co-created the first Department of English course on women in literature, led the assessment of multicultural courses, and joined other faculty in presenting this kind of work at the annual conference of the National Women’s Studies Association.
Known for her forthrightness, Dr. Mann was a faculty leader at WIU, taking an active role in shared governance. She served on many departmental and college-level committees, as well as the Faculty Senate and numerous university-level councils and committees. In recognition of this service, Dr. Mann was presented with the inaugural College of Arts and Sciences Award for Service in 1980, received a national Carnegie Foundation Award for faculty commitment in 1986, and was awarded the WOW (Women of Western) Achievement Award in 2003 for her commitment to promoting the welfare of women at Western. In addition to these honors, during her career at Western Dr. Mann was a member and officer of the Illinois Humanities Council, the state-based affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities. In 2005, Dr. Mann was named the College of Arts and Sciences John Hallwas Liberal Arts Lecturer.

CRITERIA:
Recipients of the award must have junior- or senior-level standing. Recipients must have a minimum 3.0 GPA. Recipients must be an English Major, English Minor, or a Film Minor and complete an essay written for classes in British or European Literature, or Film.