Southern Connecticut State University

The 2009 Faculty Scholar Award has been presented to Paul R. Petrie, professor of English. Petrie received the award at a campus ceremony on Sept. 21, 2009.

Petrie was recognized for his monograph "Conscience and Purpose: Fiction and Social Consciousness in Howells, Jewett, Chesnutt, and Cather" (University of Alabama Press, Studies in American Literary Realism and Naturalism series, 2005). The book is a well-researched examination of the thought and influence of William Dean Howells, a leading practitioner of literary realism in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries who was known as "the dean of American letters." Petrie's work explores Howells' call for literature as a vehicle for social change and the legacy of that call in the works of three major American authors, Charles W. Chesnutt, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Willa Cather.

One reviewer called "Conscience and Purpose" a "tightly organized" and "valuable book, distinguished by penetrating studies of all the fiction it analyzes." Another critic says the book does "a great service in recomplicating our understanding of realism and its relation to modernism. . . [while also serving] provocatively to reformulate our thinking about literature, ethics, and social change." Petrie's scholarship in "Conscience and Purpose" sheds new light on the impact of a major figure in American literary realism.

Petrie was chosen by the 2009 Faculty Scholar Award Committee. Chaired by Troy R. Paddock, professor of history, the committee includes Hugh H. Davis, CSU Professor and professor of history; Shirley A. Jackson, associate professor of sociology; Giuseppina Palma, professor of foreign languages; Valeriu Pinciu, professor of mathematics, and Mary H. Purdy, professor of communication disorders.