URI English BA and MA alum Don Rodrigues successfully defended his doctoral dissertation at Vanderbilt this past May. His dissertation, Virtue Reality: Axiology and Imagination in the English Renaissance , which emerged directly out of his MA thesis (under the direction of Professor Travis Williams) won Vanderbilt English Departments’s Robert Manson Myers Prize for best dissertation of the year. He currently holds a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Digital Humanities at Vanderbilt University.