The Department of English of Iowa State University is pleased to announce that Professor Stephen Carl Arch has been named the recipient of the 2005 Alumni Achievement Award.

Professor Arch received his B.A. in English from Iowa State University in 1982, and the Ph.D. in English from the University of Virginia in 1989. He is currently the acting department chair of the Department of English at Michigan State University, where he teaches courses in American Literature, Women Writers, Autobiography, and Philosophy and Literature.

He is the author of Authorizing the Past: The Rhetoric of History in Seventeenth-Century New England (Northern Illinois UP, 1994) and After Franklin: The Emergence of Autobiography in Post-Revolutionary American, 1780-1830 (UP of New England, 2001). His essays have appeared in The William and Mary Quarterly, Early American Literature, and Studies in American Fiction, among other venues. He is currently editing two James Fenimore Cooper novels, and serves on the editorial board of Cooper's writings. In 1996, he held the Walt Whitman Chair in American Literature at the University of Nijmegen (the Netherlands), a Fulbright appointment.

In responding to the award, Professor Arch remarked: "I still hold my undergraduate training with McCully, Gwiasda, Benson, Haggard, Whitaker, Geha, Boston, Herrnstadt, and others in the English Department at ISU in the highest regard." A date-conflict with the 2005 LAS Awards Ceremony has postponed the formal presentation of the award until 2006, but Professor Arch's accomplishments in the field of literary history and criticism are outstanding, and make him a most worthy recipient of the department's first Alumni Achievement Award.