- Posted in All University
- Category: Campus News
Lincoln University English Professor Dr. J.K. Van Dover recently won the 2015 George N. Dove Award for outstanding contributions to the serious study of mystery, detective and crime fiction from the Mystery and Detective Fiction Caucus of the Popular Culture Association.
The award, whose namesake was one of the caucus’s early members, a past president of the Popular Culture Association, and author of presentations, articles and books on detective fiction, especially the police procedural, recognizes Van Dover’s more than two decades of work on crime fiction studies, including a wide variety of lectures, presentations and publications.
Van Dover, whose articles about the genre have been published in journals, anthologies and reference books, has written 10 books, which have focused on such luminaries as Erle Stanley Gardner, Ian Fleming, Rex Stout, Raymond Chandler and Dashielle Hammett as well as broader concerns of literary analysis, including such studies as: You Know My Method: The Science of the Detective(1994) and We Must Have Certainty: Four Essays on the Detective Story (2005). His most recent book is The Judge Dee Novels of R. H. van Gulik: The Chinese Detective Story (2014). Currently, he is writing, That’s Not the Way We Run Our Country: Hard-boiled America 1939-1959.
A four-time Fulbright Guest Professor and invited guest professor, Van Dover has taught courses in detective fiction in China, Austria and Germany.