Cristina Domnisoru, Sonika Johri, James Pickett and Emily Vasiliauskas have been named co-winners of the Porter Ogden Jacobus Fellowship, Princeton University's top honor for graduate students. The fellowships support the final year of study at Princeton and are awarded to students whose work has exhibited the highest scholarly excellence.

Vasiliauskas, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English, earned her bachelor's degree from Harvard University and has two master's degrees, one from the University of Cambridge and the other from the Warburg Institute at the University of London. She joined Princeton's graduate program in 2009.

Vasiliauskas' adviser, Nigel Smith, the William and Annie S. Paton Foundation Professor of Ancient and Modern Literature and professor of English, said Vasiliauskas is "one of a new breed of highly accomplished Medieval-Renaissance scholars in literary study, confidently moving in both directions across a divide that has usually proved impassable to scholars hitherto."

Vasiliauskas' dissertation chronicles the invention of the literary afterlife in the early decades of the 17th century in England. Said Vasiliauskas: "My dissertation integrates several approaches to literature that have generally been kept separate. I combine, first, a study of three major authors with an account of a bookseller whose remarkable career has been overlooked and, second, a contribution to the history of the book with a more theoretical examination of the temporality of style. This last aspect of the project involves consequences for all historically informed literary criticism."

After graduate school, Vasiliauskas said she hopes to secure a position as a scholar and teacher of English Renaissance literature at a research university "to continue exploring the neglected aspects of this form of pluralism."