Centenary French Professor to Receive Special Humanities Award
from Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities on April 7

SHREVEPORT, LA -- Dr. Dana Kress, associate professor of French at Centenary College, has been selected to receive a Special Humanities Award from the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities at its annual awards banquet on April 7 at the Governor's Mansion in Baton Rouge.

This award is being given in recognition of the major contribution to the humanities in Louisiana that Dr. Kress has made as a scholar in various Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities programs. Included in these contributions are his groundbreaking research on artist Jean Despujols and his articles in Louisiana Cultural Vistas.

Upon receiving his Ph.D. in French from Vanderbilt University in 1992, Dr. Kress came to Centenary as an assistant professor of French. He has worked extensively with the Despujols collection at the Meadows Museum of Art and has established Le Tintamarre, Centenary's acclaimed French newspaper, which is produced entirely by students. He established the Theodore Beck Award for the outstanding senior French major, and helped secure several CODOFIL (Council for the Development of French in Louisiana) and Belgian government scholarships for Centenary students. In 1995, Dr. Kress published The Orlando Legend in Nineteenth-Century French Literature, which is a major contribution to the field.

Other awards and grants received by Dr. Kress include a grant from the Shreveport Art Guild for photographic documentation of the Despujols collection, the Centenary Alumni Research Grant to fund research on Despujols, and the Outstanding Teaching Award at Centenary in 1997 and at Vanderbilt in 1989.

His LEH award is one of three Special Awards made this year. Also to be honored are scholar and writer Kalamu Ya Salaam, an expert in African-American culture, and Dr. William Pederson of LSU in Shreveport, who has conducted LEH-funded Summer Teacher Institutes, conferences and other projects.

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