NORTON, Mass., May 23, 2006 (AScribe Newswire) -- Associate Professor of English Michael Drout, one of the nation's leading experts in the work of J.R.R. Tolkien, has been awarded the Woodrow Wilson Foundation's Millicent C. McIntosh Fellowship to complete his current book project, "From Tradition to Culture: The Exeter Book and the English Benedictine Reform."

The $15,000 fellowship will allow Drout to travel to the University of Seville, Spain, to collaborate on research on various Exeter Book poems and the Benedictine Reform with the leading experts on Anglo-Saxon riddles (which make up the majority of the final booklet in the Exeter Book). According to Drout, the Exeter Book, more than any other single literary object, represents the diversity of Anglo-Saxon poetry and culture.

"When examining four Exeter Book poems (the so-called 'wisdom poems') for How Tradition Works [Drout's newly released text], I realized that a detailed literary and cultural analysis of the Exeter Book as a whole had the potential to shed a great deal of light on Anglo-Saxon culture and cultural production," he said. "I have also identified vocabulary, images and motifs that are shared by the Exeter Book poems and some of the major documents of the Benedictine Reform. This overlap in vocabulary supports my contention of a link between the Exeter Book and the reform, but the analysis needs to be deepened and put on a firmer statistical footing."

Drout plans to conduct this analysis by borrowing techniques such as sequence analysis, approximation algorithms and Bayesian analysis borrowed from the discipline of bioinformatics. No stranger to teaching across disciplines, Drout has conducted extensive research in memetics - the study of how culture evolves as information moves from person to person - and Old English, and has written widely in those fields. He made national news in 2002 with the publication of his edition of J.R.R. Tolkien's "Beowulf and the Critics," which was based on an unpublished Tolkien manuscript Drout discovered in an Oxford, England, library in 1996. The book won the Mythopoeic Society's 2003 Award in Inklings Studies.

The Millicent C. McIntosh Fellowships for recently tenured faculty in the humanities at liberal arts colleges support especially promising faculty who demonstrate a deep commitment to excellent teaching and scholarship in the humanities, and who are exceptional citizens of their academic community. Only six awards are given annually.

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CONTACTS: Professor Michael Drout, 508-286-3607, mdrout@wheatoncollege.edu, or Jayne Iafrate, Wheaton Communications, 508-286-3504