This year’s CSUS Graduate Research Award Recipients are Philip Sayer and Austin Zwick. Sayer and Zwick will be presenting their research for the CSUS Graduate Student Workshop during the 2016-17 academic year.

Philip Sayer’s dissertation, “The Trouble with Authorship: Writing after the Death of the Author,” focuses on the ways in which contemporary writers have responded to theoretical debates around authorship. Through readings of David Foster Wallace, Maggie Nelson, Teju Cole, and Zadie Smith, and their engagements with critical theory, he argues that it is crucial to understand these writers alongside the theorists with whom they are in dialogue. The fourth chapter, on Wallace’s novel The Pale King (2011), draws on research at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, analyzing the process by which the novel was put together posthumously by Wallace’s editor in order to discuss authorship as a form of ownership. Philip Sayers is a Ph.D. candidate in English at the University of Toronto. He holds a BA in English from Cambridge, and an MA in Comparative Literature from University College London. He specializes in 20th century and contemporary Anglophone prose, psychoanalysis, and continental philosophy.

Austin Zwick’s doctoral research focuses on whether hydraulic fracturing gas drilling, commonly known as ‘fracking’, has the potential to be a viable long-term engine for economic growth. Due to upstream and downstream business linkages, this new method of energy extraction has injected a breath of life into the traditional industries inside the American Rust Belt, but it remains unclear whether agglomeration economies will develop around this new sector or whether fracking will prove to be a fleeting bubble within a larger story of urban decline. Zwick’s research uses spatial autocorrelation to find employment and residential patterns, agglomeration indices to test for new firm formation and business clustering, and econometrics on public finance data to quantify changes in the allocation of government resources.  Austin Zwick is an American-Canadian who grew up in a small town outside of Fort Worth, Texas. After obtaining his BA and MA from Cornell University, he came to University of Toronto to pursue a Ph.D. in Planning. He uses quantitative research methods and applied economic analysis to study regional growth and change instigated by the energy sector.