News of Note From Pitt

• Pitt Professor Honored for New Book on Children’s Literature 

• Pitt’s Archives Service Center Recognized for Comprehensive Guide to Frick Archives 

PITTSBURGH—Behind the larger stories about the University of Pittsburgh are other stories of faculty, staff, and student achievement as well as information on Pitt programs reaching new levels of success. The following is a compilation of some of those stories. 

Pitt Professor Honored for New Book on Children’s Literature

Pitt associate professor of English Marah Gubar is being honored with the Children’s Literature Association’s 2009 Book of the Year Award for her book Artful Dodgers: Reconceiving the Golden Age of Children’s Literature (Oxford University Press, 2009). Artful Dodgers—an analysis of Victorian and children’s literature studies—makes “a significant contribution to children’s literature scholarship,” according to an association representative. The honor, which is accompanied by cash award, will be presented to Gubar during the annual Children’s Literature Association Conference at Hollins University in Roanoke, Va., June 23-25. 

Editorial reviewers of Artful Dodgers have called it “an engaging and provocative analysis of the 20th-century critical construction of Victorian childhood,” one that “advances the entire field of children’s literature by a huge margin.” In 2009, the book was named a Times Higher Education Book of the Week.

Gubar, who is director of Pitt’s Children’s Literature Program, also has published articles on Lewis Carroll, Juliana Ewing, Lucy Maud Montgomery, E.B. White, and Jack Gantos. She is currently working on a new book project tentatively titled Acting Up: Children’s Theatre and the Case for Childhood Studies. 

Gubar earned her PhD in children’s literature at Princeton University and has been a member of the Pitt Department of English faculty since 2002.  

Pitt’s Archives Service Center Recognized for Comprehensive Guide to Frick Archives

An online collection guide at the University of Pittsburgh that outlines the comprehensive Helen Clay Frick Foundation Archives received second place in an annual regional competition. 

The Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference (MARAC) will present the award next month to project archivists Matthew Yount and Alesha Shumar of the University’s Archives Service Center, which is part of Pitt’s University Library System. Ed Galloway, head of the center, will accept the award on their behalf. Yount and Shumar worked over the course of six years to process the Helen Clay Frick Foundation Archives, which contain material reflecting the business and financial activities of Helen Clay Frick’s father, coke and steel magnate Henry Clay Frick. The materials—correspondence, contracts, newspaper clippings, architectural drawings, and invoices, among many other items—highlight Henry Clay Frick’s ascent into prominence during the late-19th and early-20th centuries. The resources include correspondence between Frick and Andrew Carnegie, including Frick’s negotiations that facilitated the megamerger that created the United States Steel Corporation in 1899. 

Using a grant from the Helen Clay Frick Foundation, the archivists processed the massive collection, wrote descriptions of the materials, provided historical backgrounds and scope and content notes, and encoded the guide for online use. Only the guide is online; the actual materials can be viewed in the Archives Service Center Reading Room, 7500 Thomas Blvd., Point Breeze. 

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4/28/11/tms/lks/jdh