English and cultural studies professor Richard Dellamora has won a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship to continue research next year on citizenship and the novel in Victorian England.

      He is one of 168 Canadian and American scholars -- and the first Trent University professor -- to receive the prestigious, international award. Only about four per cent of more than 3,000 applicants win the $30,000 US award each year. The foundation announced the winners April 8.

      Established in 1925, Guggenheim Fellowships assist scholars who have "demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship" to engage more fully in their academic pursuits.

      "Prof. Dellamora is an internationally recognized expert on Victorian-era literature and society. His published work is widely acknowledged by specialists in the field as very distinguished and his selection for this prestigious award recognizes his exceptional abilities as a scholar," says Trent research dean Paul Healy. "The selection of Prof. Dellamora for a Guggenheim Fellowship, through an extraordinarily competitive selection process, is a great credit to him and also to the university."

      Dellamora joined Trent's faculty in 1971 after graduating with a doctorate in English from Yale University. He earned a BA in English from Queens' College, Cambridge University in 1968 and a master's degree from Yale in 1970.

      Currently acting chair of the graduate program in Methodologies for the Study of Western History and Culture, Dellamora also teaches Victorian literature and a Cultural Studies course.

      As a Guggenheim Fellow, he will be a visiting scholar in New York University's English department in New York. He intends to continue research on the cultural construction of masculinities in Victorian England. "I'm interested in the way in which intimacy between men structures politics within fiction and within ordinary life in Victorian England." He will examine male portraits by gender, class, race and religion in such novels as Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist, Benjamin Disraeli's Coningsby and Anthony Trollope's The Prime Minister.

      Dellamora has written and edited four books. In 1990, he published Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism; in 1994, Apocalyptic Overtures: Sexual Politics and the Sense of an Ending. He edited Postmodern Apocalypse: Theory and Cultural Practice at the End (1995), and co-edited The Work of Opera: Genre, Nationhood and Sexual Difference (1997).