A literary scholar at the University of California, Davis, has been awarded a prestigious 2003 Guggenheim Fellowship to look at Victorian life and the memorized poem.

Catherine Robson, an associate professor of English, is among the 184 artists, scholars and scientists selected from more than 3,200 applicants for the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation's 79th annual competition.

Using support from the fellowship, Robson plans to write a book that examines the 19th century British practice of memorizing and reciting poetry at school. She will trace the long-lasting and wide-ranging effects of three of the most frequently assigned poems to understand how far a literary work could penetrate into the experience of ordinary people and everyday life.

By focusing on literature's complex relationship to historical and ethical issues and scrutinizing the movement of poems through time, Robson represents a new interdisciplinary direction in English scholarship, according to David Simpson, chair of the UC Davis Department of English.

"Her work appeals not just to literary scholars but to educated readers more generally," he said.

Robson received the Guggenheim Fellowship on the basis of her distinguished achievement in the past and exceptional promise for the future.

"She's had a great year," Simpson said. "She applied for several prestigious fellowships, expecting to get one, and ended up getting them all." In fact, in addition to the Guggenheim award, this academic year Robson received a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, a University of California President's Research Fellowship in the Humanities and a UC Davis Chancellor's Fellowship. The fellowships will allow Robson a year and a half of funded leave to write her new book.

In 2001 Robson wrote "Men in Wonderland: The Lost Girlhood of the Victorian Gentleman," based on her belief that for many Victorian men, the idealized little girl represented their own lost childhood. The book details the fascination with little girls that pervaded Victorian culture.

Robson joined the UC Davis faculty in 1995 after finishing her doctorate in English from UC Berkeley. A member of the faculty of the University of California Dickens Project, Robson hosts its graduate conference at UC Davis every other year. She has just accepted an invitation to join the editorial board of the "Norton Anthology of English Literature" as the new specialist for the Victorian age and is spending this quarter in England directing the campus's short-term program abroad in London.

UC Davis is among 89 institutions in United States and Canada recognized with Guggenheim Fellows this spring. Fellows are appointed by recommendations from expert advisers on the basis of distinguished past achievement and the promise of future accomplishment. Awards this year total $6.7 million; fellowships are expected to average about $36,700 per fellow.