College of the Redwoods student is the 4th one to win Dickens scholarship

HUMOLDT COUNTY, Calif. — College of the Redwoods Honors student Kaylee Steiner has been awarded a 2018 Dickens Universe Community College scholarship for her essay, "Napoleon and the Destroyer: Money and Status as Motivating Forces in [H. G. Wells's] Tono-Bungay," a literary analysis paper she wrote as partial fulfillment of an Honors credit contract.

The Dickens annual scholarship competition is open to all California community college students. The scholarship will send Steiner to a week-long Dickens Universe conference at UC Santa Cruz, where she will attend classes, lectures, and discussion groups. She will also attend an undergraduate seminar and earn five University of California units. Travel, room, board, tuition, and other fees are included in the scholarship.

Sponsored by the Dickens Project, an international scholarly consortium, the Dickens Universe is not only the major academic conference on Dickens in the world; it also offers a unique experience, as this quotation from the Dickens Project website describes: "Now in its 38th year of operation, the Dickens Universe combines features of a scholarly conference, a festival, a book club, and summer camp. Participants include people of all ages and walks of life—distinguished scholars, graduate students, undergraduates, retirees, young professionals, high school teachers, anyone who loves to read and who enjoys long Victorian novels." The Universe Community College scholarship is also very unusual in its dual focus on community college students and the Humanities.

In being chosen for a Dickens Universe scholarship, Steiner joins a stellar group of CR student winners; she is the fourth winner from CR since the scholarship was first launched in 2011 (and the third CR Honors student). All the past winners have gone on to continued success: Joshua Commander just completed a year of full-time teaching at Southern Oregon University, Christopher Pitts is completing his undergraduate degree at Berkeley, and Erin Sandvold is thriving at the University of Oregon.

“I think that CR students have performed so well in this statewide competition because of their own talent and hard work, nurtured by CR's commitment to academic excellence and by the English department's emphasis on conscientious revision” said CR English professor Susan Nordlof.

For more information on the Dickens Project, the Dickens Universe, and the Community College scholarship, you can find it on the Dickens Project website: https://dickens.ucsc.edu/index.html. There was also an excellent article on the Dickens Universe in the Aug 29, 2011 New Yorker, which can be accessed at https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/08/29/dickens-in-eden.