DCU President’s Research Awards 2000

Dr. Jenny Williams

School of Applied Language and Intercultural Studies

The President's Research Award has been awarded to Dr Jenny Williams for her outstanding contribution to research in the Humanities. Through her contributions to understanding in the fields of translation studies, second-language acquisition and German studies, Dr Williams is a scholar whose work has greatly added to the sum of knowledge in these different areas. Her scholarship has been characterised by integrity, openness and a refreshing and an abiding sense of curiosity. Her exemplary biography of the German writer Hans Fallada provided a unique insight not only into one of the main figures in twentieth-century German literature but also into the complex relationship between the individual, art and society in a tragic and difficult period of human history. This work is informed by an intensely humane concern with the consequences of the tension between aesthetics and politics, tensions that are often only resolved at a high human cost.

Dr Williams' work has never been a hostage to disciplinary prejudices. She has moved with competence and courage between different subject areas with the constant aim of mutual illumination. She is alive to languages and cultures not as static border posts of containment but as the sources of an endless indebtedness to and engagement with the Other. It is not only in her academic work that she has demonstrated a great generosity of spirit but this generosity is also to be found in the guidance she has given to her research students over the years and the unparalleled example she has provided to her colleagues of diligence, intellectual ambition and good humour.

The University salutes the many research achievements of Dr Jenny Williams and the President's Research Award honours her significant role in furthering our contemporary understanding of language, culture and society.