Tess Grogan ’14 Earns Prestigious Marshall Scholarship

A recent alumna who’s interested in studying how medieval and Renaissance texts have shaped perceptions of heroes (and heroines!) in young adult (YA) and genre fiction is one of approximately 40 people nationally who will receive the prestigious 2015 Marshall Scholarship.

Tess Grogan ’14 will use the award, which is generally considered to be on a par with the Rhodes Scholarship, to study medieval and Renaissance literature at either the University of St. Andrews in Scotland or at the University of Cambridge in England. Her program will begin in fall 2015.

The Marshall Scholarships finance young American scholars of high ability for graduate studies in the United Kingdom. Grogan is the 12th Smith student or alumna to receive the scholarship since the program began in 1956. Before Grogan, Smith’s most recent Marshall Scholar was Maria Quine ’82.

A Greenfield, Mass., native who has been working in Hadley editing world languages exams since graduating from Smith this past May, Grogan hopes to pursue a career as an academic writer and teacher. But her real goal is to be “part of a movement” that encourages both critics and everyday readers to take children’s literature seriously. In particular, Grogan says she wants to apply critical theory to children’s and YA literature in order to better understand the role of non-traditional protagonists, who don’t fit the traditional mold of the white, male hero.

This research interest is far from mainstream, but Grogan says she was always interested in the topic. While at Smith, she realized that she could study YA and genre fiction with the same tools that other scholars apply to canonical writers like Faulkner, Hemingway or Shakespeare. “I wanted to explore critically the works that I’d read as a child, that young girls continue to read,” Grogan said. “The texts that we read as children have as much or more influence on us as the weighty texts we encounter later in life,” Grogan said.

For her Smith honors thesis, Grogan examined female heroism in the work of Tamora Pierce (whose early novels feature women becoming knights within a fantasy kingdom), as framed through the writing of Ursula K. Le Guin. Grogan’s work was recognized with the Drew Prize, awarded annually to the best English thesis. She also earned awards from Smith, from the Massachusetts Center for Renaissance Studies and from the Worcester State University Undergraduate Shakespeare Conference for a 2013 essay she wrote about monsters and King Lear.

Grogan says she was “excited and kind of shocked” when she received a Monday morning call from Marshall Committee chair Joanna Lau alerting her that she’d won the scholarship. “I was also incredibly grateful to all the people at Smith who supported me,” she said. “We were doing it as a team,” she said.

On that team, Grogan listed her recommenders—Professors Jefferson Hunter, Bill Oram, Naomi Miller and Michael Gorra—as well as Lazarus Career Center Director Stacie Hagenbaugh and Fellowships Adviser Don Andrew. Grogan noted, too, the dozens of faculty who had helped her prepare through practice interview sessions.

Bill Oram, the Helen Means Professor of English Language and Literature, was Grogan’s thesis adviser. He noted that he was initially reluctant to advise a thesis about an author whose work he hadn’t read. “But more than almost any other student I’ve worked with, Tess had such a clear sense of the questions she wanted to ask and the way she wanted to answer them. I was persuaded, almost against my better judgment, and I agreed.” In the end, Oram says, “She was right, and I was wrong. She wrote a thesis that was, in a quiet way, groundbreaking, engaging issues of class, race and gender in thinking about popular chivalric fantasy, and doing so with great sophistication.”

Professor Emeritus Jefferson Hunter, who studied at Bristol University as a Marshall Scholar from 1968 to 1970, said Grogan’s outstanding qualities became apparent soon after he met her. Grogan served as Hunter’s research assistant on a massive film project that involved preparing 14 hour-long videos about the art of film. “She’s an unbelievably good writer, and she masters material quickly,” Hunter noted.

Having been a Marshall Scholar himself, Hunter said he was especially pleased that Grogan would have an opportunity to spend time immersing herself in another part of the world. “It was a completely formative experience for me,” he said. “It completely changed my life. I’m delighted that Tess will have that experience.”