Campus News

Bosco Honored with Thoreau Society Medal

(October 8, 2004)

English Professor Ronald Bosco, winner of The Thoreau Society Medal, was recently named Distinguished Professor.

At The Thoreau Society annual meeting in July in Concord, Mass., Ronald A. Bosco, a member of the UAlbany faculty since 1975 and Distinguished Service Professor of English and American Literature since 1992, was presented with The Thoreau Society Medal, the society�s highest award.

The Thoreau Society is the world�s oldest and largest organization devoted to the legacy of an American writer, and Bosco, a past-president of both the Thoreau and the Emerson societies, is only the fifth person and first literary scholar to receive this award.

Earlier, he received the Lyman H. Butterfield Award for lifetime achievement as a textual editor from the Association for Documentary Editing at its annual meeting in Chicago. Named General Editor in 2003 of The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson series published by Harvard University Press, Bosco has been an editor of the Emerson Family Papers at Harvard�s Houghton Library since 1977. On July 24, he delivered �Thoreau and the Re-formed Self� at the Walden University (Minneapolis, Minn.) commencement held in Bloomington, Ind.; on October 2, he delivered a plenary address, � �Build, therefore, your own world�: Emersonian Reflections on the Concept of �Global Individualism�,� at the Re-Awakening East-West Connections: Walden and Beyond symposium held at the Boston Research Center for the 21st Century in Cambridge, Mass.

A prolific writer and lecturer on Puritan poetics and homiletics and on New England Transcendentalism, Bosco most enjoys bringing the fruits of his research into the undergraduate classroom, where this semester he is teaching a course on the American Poetic Tradition in the General Education curriculum and another on Early American Life and Letters, which he co-created and is team-teaching with Jill Murphy, a doctoral candidate in English.