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The William Morris Society in the United States is calling for applications for the 2018 Joseph R. Dunlap Memorial Fellowship. The deadline is December 15, 2017. The Dunlap Fellowship supports scholarly and creative work about William Morris.  The fellowship offers funding of $1000 or more for research and other expenses, including travel to conferences and libraries. Projects may deal with any subject—biographical, literary, historical, social, artistic, political, typographical—relating to Morris. The Society also encourages translations of Morris's works and the production of teaching materials (lesson plans and course materials) suitable for use at the elementary, secondary, college or adult-education level. Applications are sought particularly from younger members of the Society and from those at the beginning of their careers. Recipients may be from any country and need not have an academic or institutional appointment, nor must recipients hold the Ph.D. In some years the

In his essay “The Worker’s Share of Art,” published in his socialist newspaper Commonweal in April 1885, William Morris defined beauty as “the sign of free and happy work.” Following John Ruskin, he believed that the aesthetic surface of a creative work could reveal a deeper social totality, and the conditions of labor under which it was produced. The worker’s pleasure was, Morris said, the true font of art and beauty: The chief source of art is man’s pleasure in his daily necessary work, which expresses itself and is embodied in that work itself; nothing else can make the common surroundings of life beautiful, and whenever they are beautiful it is a sign that men’s work has pleasure in it, however they may suffer otherwise. For over a century now, Morris’s critics have wondered whether he was able to create such conditions of beauty and pleasure for the workers in his own decorative arts firm. In moving the firm to Merton Abbey in 1881, he hoped to create a guild-like setting for pl