Kudos

Tara Ann Neil, who represented UB as Miss University, was named second runner-up in the 1999 Miss New York State Scholarship Pageant held June 17-19 in Watertown. Neil, who received her bachelor's degree from UB in May and will begin graduate studies in history this fall, was awarded a $3,500 scholarship. The Miss Buffalo and Miss University Scholarship Pageant, an official preliminary competition for Miss America hosted by the university, was honored by the Miss New York State Organization as this year's best new local pageant.

Jill Robbins, associate professor of English, is the author of a new book, "Altered Reading: Levinas and Literature," from The University of Chicago Press. Robbins shows how the thread of the literary leads directly to the internal tensions of the renowned French thinker Emmanuel Levinas's ethical discourse.

Paul T. Feigenbaum, a 1998 graduate of the Department of English, has been awarded a 1999 Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship in Humanistic Studies from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation. Feigenbaum is one of only 98 winners of the prestigious award, which is the only national humanities graduate award. Nearly 800 of the country's top humanities scholars competed in the 1999 fellowship competition. Feigenbaum, who will begin doctoral work in the University of Michigan Department of English Language and Literature this fall, has been working as an intern in Washington, D.C., at the Wilson Quarterly Journal since he graduated from UB. As a UB undergraduate, Feigenbaum received the Arthur Axlerod Memorial Prize for Poetry in 1997 and the George Knight Houpt Prize for Excellence in English Studies in 1998.