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The William Morris Society in the U.S. is pleased to award the 2017 Dunlap Fellowship to Sarah Leonard , a Ph.D. candidate in Art History at the University of Delaware. Her dissertation, “‘The beauty of the bough-hung banks’: William Morris in the Thames Landscape,” promises to be an important contribution not only to Morris studies but to understanding of the natural environment in the Victorian era. Here is Sarah's summary of her project: My dissertation investigates the disparate riverside landscapes of the Victorian Thames as dominant presences in Morris’s varied and intertwined roles as designer, author, political thinker, and factory owner. As a lifelong London resident, Morris was most familiar with the polluted, industrialized city Thames. However, he drew visual inspiration from the rural landscape of the Upper Thames around Kelmscott for his famous pattern designs, and he put forward the same landscape as a medievalist and Socialist pastoral ideal in his poetry, novels,