Editor's Note: Louis Round Wilson Prize

The Editorial Board of Studies in Philology voted at its annual meeting in May 2008 to establish an annual prize of $1000 for the best article published in the journal during the previous year. The first prize will be for an article published in 2008 (SP, vol. 105), and the article will be selected by a committee of three drawn from the editorial board and staff of the journal. The winning article will be announced at the Editorial Board's spring meeting in 2009.

The Board voted to name the prize in honor of Louis Round Wilson (27 December 1876–10 December 1979) whose monograph Chaucer's Relative Constructions, based on his 1905 UNC doctoral dissertation, appeared as the first issue of Studies in Philology in 1906. Wilson, who also served on the journal's editorial committee from 1910–13, had a distinguished career as librarian at UNC from 1901 until 1932, when he left to become dean of the Graduate Library School at the University of Chicago. He returned to UNC in 1942 to become a member of the faculty of UNC's School of Library Science. He later served as special assistant for development to the chancellor. After he retired in 1959, he became special assistant to the president of the University until he stepped down from that post in 1969, when he was almost 93. He died in 1979 shortly before his 103rd birthday.

During his tenure as librarian he did much to develop a library collection that would support graduate study, and he oversaw the construction of two of the university's libraries, including the beautiful building that opened in 1929 as the main library and that was named in his honor in 1956. The library's main collection was moved to the new Davis Library in 1983, and the Louis Round Wilson library is now used for special holdings such as the Rare Books, Maps, and the North Carolina Collection.