Graduate school honors dissertation winners

Two Kansas University doctoral candidates won prizes for their outstanding dissertations.

Sara Running Danger, in English, won the $1,000 Dorothy Haglund Prize for her dissertation, “Transforming Images: Victorian Women Writers, Popular Images and the Literary Marketplace.”

Dilip Natarajan, in chemical and petroleum engineering, won the $1,250 Marnie and Bill Argersinger Award for his dissertation, “Experimental and Modeling Studies on the Spatiotemporal Current Density Distribution in a PEM Fuel Cell.”

The awards were given May 21 during the hooding ceremony for the Graduate School.

Sign design sought for governors’ hometowns

The Kansas Department of Commerce is soliciting designs for highway signs that will designate cities where the state’s former governors have lived.

“The Governor’s Hometown Logo Competition is a way to celebrate the wonderful Kansas communities that have provided us with some of our greatest statesmen,” Commerce Secretary Howard Fricke said.

Entry forms are available on the department’s Web site, www.kansascommerce.com. Sketches are due July 15.

Entries must include an image of the Statehouse dome.

Three Kansas governors are from Lawrence: Charles Robinson, 1861-63; Walter Stubbs, 1909-13; George Docking, 1957-61.

Museum receives grant for archives

The Watkins Community Museum of History was one of five organizations to benefit from recently awarded grants from the Kansas Humanities Council.

The Watkins Museum received $3,500 to catalogue, index and store 1,500 archival materials from the museum’s collections. The project should help improve access to the museum’s historical archives. Helen Krishe will be the project director.

The Humanities Council awarded $25,844 in Heritage and Humanities grants during its summer grantmaking session. The grants are intended to support the study of local cultures or to engage the public in humanities.