Westminster, Md. (PRWEB) October 01, 2013
McDaniel College has been awarded a $ 100,000 grant from the Nora Roberts Foundation. This is the third consecutive year that the college has received funding from Nora Roberts, the best-selling author of more than 200 romance novels.
The grant from the Nora Roberts Foundation supports the Nora Roberts Contemporary American Fiction Collection housed in Hoover Library at McDaniel College. The collection includes the complete works of Nora Roberts and J.D. Robb, as well as works of other contemporary American writers. This collection has helped to establish McDaniel as one of the few centers for the study of the romance genre.
Dr. Roger Casey, president of McDaniel College, said, “This gift will allow the college to reinforce Ms. Roberts’ reputation in the academic and literary arenas as a master of and dedicated advocate for the romance genre.”
The Nora Roberts Center for American Romance at McDaniel College supports academic scholarship on the American romance novel with special emphasis on the literary qualities and significance of the romance. McDaniel has launched an online graduate certificate in romance writing and an undergraduate minor in popular fiction, both believed to be the first of their kind.
McDaniel English professor Pam Regis, a nationally recognized expert on romance novels and author of “A Natural History of the Romance Novel,” directs the center and is president of the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance.
“This generous gift from the Nora Roberts Foundation continues to enable the college to support the study of romance, the most popular form of fiction on the planet, and thereby further the acceptance of romance as a genre,” Regis said.
Nora Roberts is a best-selling author of more than 200 romance novels. Her first, “Irish Thoroughbred,” was published in 1981. More than 280 million copies of her books are in print, including 12 million copies sold in 2005 alone. She also writes romantic suspense novels under the pseudonym J.D. Robb for the “In Death” series. McDaniel College awarded her an honorary Doctor of Letters degree in 2006.
For more information about McDaniel College, visit http://www.mcdaniel.edu.
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McDaniel College, recognized nationally among “40 Colleges that Change Lives” and U.S. News top-tier liberal arts colleges, is a four-year private college of the liberal arts and sciences offering more than 70 undergraduate programs of study, including dual and student-designed majors, plus 25 highly regarded graduate programs. Its hallmark faculty-student collaborations in research, teaching and mentoring plus hundreds of leadership and service opportunities enrich a lively learning experience that is rooted in a personalized interdisciplinary and global curriculum. Innovative January courses take students to points all over the world while McDaniel’s degree-granting European campus offers a unique opportunity for international study at the only American university in Budapest, Hungary. A diverse and close-knit community of 1,600 undergraduates and 1,560 part-time graduate students, McDaniel also boasts a spectacular 160-acre hilltop campus in Westminster, Md., an hour or less from Baltimore, D.C., the Chesapeake Bay, an Amtrak station and BWI international airport.
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