UVic English alum Joe Diemer wins the Lieutenant Governor's Silver Medal (Non-Thesis)
Former UVic English Honours and MA student Joe Diemer has won the Lieutenant Governor's Silver Medal (Non-Thesis) for their graduating MA essay, “Dialling in to Eternity: Margaret Gatty and the Book of Sundials”, as well as their academic excellence, and record of prizes, awards, and publications.
Joe has won all available UVic graduate (and undergraduate) honours, prizes, and distinctions, including a CGS-M scholarship and the 2024 Mairi Riddell Memorial Book Prize, which is the graduate program’s highest academic distinction awarded to the best graduate seminar paper in English. In addition, they received a 2024 Founders’ Circle Award by the Victorian Studies Association of Western Canada, given to the best conference presentation by an emerging scholar (usually the recipient is a doctoral or post-doctoral student, not an MA student in their second term). At the University of Toronto, where Diemer is a first-year PhD student in what is considered Canada’s most competitive English program, they won a Faculty of Arts and Sciences Top Doctoral Fellowship (2024-2028) as well as an Ontario Graduate Scholarship.
Now a first-year PhD student in the department of English and the Book History and Print Culture collaborative specialization at the University of Toronto, Joe Deimer holds an honours BA and an MA from the University of Victoria, where their research engaged with constructions of time, ability, and religious experience in the work of Henry Cole and Margaret Gatty. They are especially interested in short forms, including children's stories, epigrams, emblems, and most recently, sundial mottoes.