Lorraine Kochanske Stock, Associate Professor of English, is the recipient of the 2011 inaugural Bonnie Wheeler Summer Research Fellowship, funded by The Dallas Foundation to honor Bonnie Wheeler, a medievalist at Southern Methodist University. Wheeler, just retired from the editorship of Arthuriana, the premier journal of King Arthur Studies, has long been a tireless crusader for the cause of women in academia and a powerful mentor of many budding medievalists, through her editorship of the cutting edge "New Middle Ages Series" published by Palgrave Macmillan. Designed to support the research of women medievalists below the rank of full professor, the $7,000 Bonnie Wheeler Summer Fellowship supports research during the period of June 1–December 31, 2011. The fellowship targets women medievalists below the rank of full professor, providing research and writing time for candidates who are "caught in the middle" in the promotion ladder. It is designed to enable them to complete an interrupted research project that will significantly enhance understanding of the medieval period and to enable them to earn promotion, achieve academic leadership, and develop new research and teaching projects.

Stock’s award will support the completion of a monograph, The Medieval Wild Man: Primitivism and Civilization in Medieval Europe, to be published by Palgrave Macmillan. The book challenges the prevailing scholarly understanding of medieval attitudes toward the mythic Wild Man and nature. Using the works of major Continental and English medieval authors as evidence, Stock demonstrates that the Wild Man’s cultural transformation from Homme Sauvage into Noble Savage occurred far earlier than is now held; indeed, Europeans personally identified with the Wild Man as early as the twelfth century. Stock’s book project was put on hold while she developed a series of FDIP and QEP-funded pedaggical initiatives at UH, especially the creation of an undergraduate hybrid Chaucer course, for which she won the 2008 UH Teaching Excellence Award for Innovative Teaching with Technology and the South Eastern Medieval Association’s 2009 Teaching Excellence Award. The inaugural awarding of the Bonnie Wheeler fellowship was celebrated at the 46th International Congress of Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, Michigan, where Stock was given her fellowship funding by Bonnie Wheeler herself at a champagne and dessert reception at the Radisson Hotel on May 12, 2011.