FROM MDAH RELEASES — The 2014 Eudora Welty Research Fellowship has been awarded to Jacob Agner, a doctoral candidate in English at the University of Mississippi. Agner will use the $2,000 fellowship to cover expenses incurred while working with the Eudora Welty Collection at MDAH, where he will explore the influence of film noir on Welty’s short stories, particularly “The Demonstrators.”

“I am interested in ‘rural noir,’ the crime fiction and potboilers of southern writers like Welty,” said Agner. “She seems like the least likely noirish writer, but in some of her stories there’s a strain of sudden violence and an anxiety that can’t be quite placed.”

“Jacob Agner’s distinctive research interest promises to add to the high caliber of scholarship of previous Welty Fellows,” said Julia Marks Young, director of the MDAH Archives and Record Services Division.

Established by the Eudora Welty Foundation and MDAH, the fellowship seeks to encourage and support research use of the Eudora Welty Collection by graduate students.