Dr. Ben P. Robertson, professor of English, has been awarded Troy University’s Wallace D. Malone, Jr. Distinguished Faculty Award.
Dr. Robertson, who joined the TROY faculty in 2003, was presented the award by Dr. Jack Hawkins, Jr., Chancellor, and Dr. Earl Ingram, Senior Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs, during the University’s annual Faculty/Staff Convocation on Friday at the Troy Campus.
The award consists of a $1,000 cash prize and a medallion to be worn with academic regalia. The award is made possible through a $100,000 endowment by the SouthTrust Corporation. Wallace Malone, former chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer of SouthTrust, served as a TROY trustee from 1975-1995.
“I’m deeply honored to receive the 2016-2017 Wallace D. Malone, Jr., Distinguished Faculty Award,” Dr. Robertson said. “I’d like to thank all of my colleagues across the university, and especially those in the English Department with whom I work most closely, for their support and encouragement. As I continue to work here at the university, I will aspire even harder to live up to the standards of teaching, service, and scholarship encouraged by the Malone Award. I will work especially hard to open more avenues of opportunity for others — for fellow faculty and for students. Finally, I’d like to express my special thanks to the award’s namesake for his generous and thoughtful encouragement of the faculty at Troy University.”
Dr. Robertson has numerous publications to his credit, including books, articles, reviews and bibliographies. His most recent project is a compilation of the first complete scholarly edition of plays by the English writer Elizabeth Inchbald, a significant figure in Romantic-era Britain who defied the gender conventions of her day. The project is being funded through a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Dr. Robertson’s dissertation focused on Inchbald’s two novels, and in 2007, he published a three-volume edition of her diaries. He is also the author of the books “Elizabeth Inchbald’s Reputation: A Publishing and Reception History” (Pickering & Chatto, 2013) and “Inchbald, Hawthorne and the Romantic Moral Romance” (Pickering & Chatto, 2010). He also has written and presented on a number of authors, playwrights and poets including Nathaniel Hawthorne, John Moore, William Shakespeare and John Keats, among others. He has served as a bibliographer for the Keats-Shelley Journal since 2005 and a field editor for Mellen Press since 2013.
Dr. Robertson is a member of numerous professional organizations, including the Modern Language Association, the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism, the Keats-Shelley Association, the Byron Society of America, the Wordsworth-Coleridge Association, the College English Association, the Southeastern American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies and the International Conference on Romanticism.
Prior to joining the TROY faculty, Dr. Robertson served in several capacities at the University of Tulsa, including writing program coordinator, director of the Writing Center and instructor of English. He also previously served as a research assistant in the Department of English at the University of Central Arkansas.
Dr. Robertson holds a bachelor’s degree in English from Henderson State University (1995) and a master’s degree in English language and literature from the University of Central Arkansas (1998). He earned his Ph.D. in English language and literature from the University of Tulsa in 2003.
