Dissertation Prizes * Dissertation-Year Awards * Graduate Center Awards

DISSERTATION PRIZES

The Alumni and Doctoral Faculty Prize for the Most Distinguished Dissertation of the Year:
Jennifer Bernstein
“American Antinomianisms from Anne Hutchinson to Pragmatism”
Director: Professor Joan Richardson

Christopher Iannini
“Fatal Revolutions: U.S. Natural Histories of the Greater Caribbean, 1707-1856"
Director: Professor William Kelly

The Robert Adams Day Prize for the Best Dissertation Involving Interdisciplinary Work:
Marianne Giordani
“The Sublime: A Modern Trope for Literary Value and Poetic Reform”
Director: Professor Joan Richardson

Lauren Kozol
“Forging Creation: Avant-Garde Collaborations Between the World Wars”
Director: Professor Felicia Bonaparte

The Adrienne Auslander Munich Prize for the Best Dissertation Involving Women's Writing:
Jennifer N. Brown
“A Critical Edition of and Commentary on MS Douce 114: The Middle English
Vitae of Elizabeth of Spalbeek, Christina Mirabilis, and Marie d’Oignies”
Directors: Professors Michael Sargent and Scott Westrem

The Irving Howe Prize for the Best Dissertation Involving Politics and Literature:
Lara Kwalbrun
“Playing God’s Chosen: Protestants, Jews, and Sixteenth-Century Drama”
Director: Professor Richard McCoy

Sarah Fleming Relyea
“Outsider Citizens The Remaking of Postwar Identity in Wright, Beauvoir, and Baldwin”
Director: Professor Nancy K. Miller

The David Gordon Prizes for the Best Dissertations in 20th Century Studies:
Gregory Erickson
“Reading in the Dark: Modernism and the Absence of God”
Director: Professor Mary Ann Caws

The Alfred Kazin Prize for the Best Dissertation in American Literature and Culture:
Tom Cerasulo
“Writers Like Me: Fitzgerald, West, Parker, Schulberg, and Hollywood”
Director: Professor Marc Dolan

David Humphries
“Different Dispatches: Journalism in American Modernist Prose”
Director: Professor Joan Richardson

The Thomas Healy Prize for the Best Dissertation in Poetry and Poetics:
Margaret M.  Nelson
“Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions”
Director: Professor Wayne Koestenbaum

Melvin Dixon Prize for the Best Dissertation in African-American Studies:
Ira Dworkin
“American Hearts: African-American Writing on the Congo, 1890-1915"
Director: Professor Michele Wallace

The Paul Monette Prize for the Best Dissertation in Gay and Lesbian Studies
Michelle Ann Abate
“‘Tom/Boys’: The Racialization of White Tomboys in American Women’s Fiction,
1840-1950"
Director: Professor David S. Reynolds

The Alfred Gordon Prize for Distinguished Work in Medieval Studies
Christina Christoforatou
“Visualizing Medieval Otherworlds in Greco-Byzantine Romances”
Director: Professor Scott Westrem

The Alfred Gordon Prize for Distinguished Work in Early Modern Studies
Mark R. Kelley
“Poetics of Lament: John Milton and the Influence of Euripedes”
Director: Professor Joseph Wittreich

DISSERTATION YEAR AWARDS

The Alumni and Faculty Dissertation Year Award
Christina Mohler
“Where are the Women? Deconstructing Male Homoerotic Desire in Early Modern England”
Director: Professor Mario DiGangi

Shawn O’Toole
“Novel Habits: Eliot, Meredith, James, Wool.”
Director: Professor Rachel Brownstein

The Millennium Dissertation Year Award
Christine Pichini
“Being-sent: Maternal Correspondence in the Works of Marcel Proust, Marianne Moore,
Elizabeth Bishop, Joseph Cornell, and Ray Johnson”
Director: Professor Wayne Koestenbaum

Eric Tribunella
“Melancholia and the Contemporary American Bildungsroman for Children and Adolescents”
Director: Professor Steven Kruger

The Morton Cohen Dissertation Year Travel Awards
June Dunn
"Troubled Houses: Irish Women Writing the Great War"
Dissertation Director: Professor Jane Marcus

The Lynn Kadison Dissertation Year Awards for Service
Vincent Bissonette
“The Passions of the Philosopher: Coleridge and the
Eighteenth-Century Discourse of the Passions”
Director: Professor Blanford Parker

Diana Polley
“Transhistorical Emerson: Republic of the Spirit in Twain, James, Wharton, and Cather”
Director: Professor William Kelly

GRADUATE CENTER AWARDS

Mario Cappelloni Dissertation  Fellowship
Crystal Benedicks
“Spasmodic Bodies and Victorian Poetics: Reconsidering the Taint of Spasmodicism”
Director: Professor Anne Humpherys

MAGNET Dissertation Fellowships
Jonathan Gray
"To Reveal Our Better Selves: Liberal White Writers' Response to the Challenges
of the Civil Rights Movement"
Director: Professor Robert Reid-Pharr

Ronaldo Wilson
"Black Bodies Black Field(s): Twentieth-Century and Contemporary Poetics of the
Black Body in African American Poetry and Visual Culture"
Director: Professor Meena Alexander

Andrew Silk Dissertation Fellowship
Ann Wallace
"Inscribed in Skin: Gender, Trauma, and Marked Bodies"
Director: Professor Nancy K. Miller