George Mason University

• Amal Amireh is the 2008-2009 George Mason University Fenwick Fellow for her study "Arab Masculinity Between Globalization and Empire"
• Helon Habila has won a 2008 Library of Virginia Award.  Library of Virginia Literary Awards are given to outstanding Virginia authors in the areas of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.  Helon won the fiction award for his novel Measuring Time (Penguin Books).
• Byron Hawk has received honorable mention in the Modern Language Association's Mina P. Shaughnessy Prize for his book A Counter-history of Composition: Toward Methodologies of Complexity, published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. The Mina P. Shaughnessy prize is awarded for an outstanding work in the fields of language, culture, literacy, or literature with strong application to the teaching of English
• Susan Lawrence has received a $25,000 grant from Lockheed Martin Advanced Technical Laboratories for her work on the project, "Research in Rhetoric for TACTIC II"
• Erika Lin's "Performance Practice and Theatrical Privilege: Rethinking Weimann's Concepts of Locus and Platea" has been selected to receive the Medieval and Renaissance Drama Society's 2008 Martin Stevens Award for Best New Essay in Early Drama Studies. 
• Choice Magazine, which provides capsule reviews of academic books, has announced that Robert Matz's The World of Shakespeare's Sonnets: An Introduction has been named by the magazine as a 2008 Outstanding Academic Text.  Matz is an Associate Professor of English and the Chair of the English Department.
• Mason is one of only 23 schools — and one of only nine public institutions — highlighted in “Writing in the Disciplines,” one of the special categories under “Academic Programs to Look for” in U.S. News and World Report's “America's Best Colleges 2009.”  The ranking reflects Mason's strong Writing Across the Curriculum program, directed by English Department Associate Professor Terry Zawacki.