Matthew Rinkevich Receives Award At This Year's Doctoral Hooding Ceremony

​Matthew Rinkevich earned the 2021 Wilbur Owen Sypherd Prize in Humanities for his dissertation, titled Signs That Save: Sacramental Matter and Agency in English Literature 1590–1660. Rinkevich’s research explores the imaginative interplay between literature and material cultures of religion in Reformation-era England. In particular, his work reevaluates what is known about the relationship between human beings and their material environments, and focuses on the ways in which sacred objects like communion bread, holy water and relics acted on and affected people spiritually. According to Kristen Poole, Ned B. Allen Professor of English and Rinkevich’s adviser, his dissertation includes a tremendous amount of original archival work that “helps to reveal that thinking about materiality has striking consonances and revealing distinctions across human history.”