Awards

Any article-length essay originally written for an English Department seminar is eligible. A revised version is welcome, as long as the essay has not been accepted for publication. Entries will be anonymized before being read by the Graduate Committee.

This award celebrates a graduate student in the English Department who has demonstrated exceptional service to the department culture, community, and collective wellbeing.  

2026:

Best Essay: Hiro Terasawa - "Unfinished Touch; or When Melville’s Hands Go Mad"

Richardson Award:  Angelica Johnson - "The Ethics of Memory Work: Exploring Black Women Memory Workers"

Richardson Award: Anmol Sahni - "Warring and Warming Worlds: Postcoloniality, Insurgency, and Ecological Crises in World Literature."

Service & Leadership Award: Em Nordling & Lucy Wallitsch

2025:

Best Essay: Anmol Sahni - “Metonymic Nations, Synecdochic Families: Writing Back to Uganda with Metafiction in Kintu.”

Best Essay Honorable Mention: Apala Bhowmick - “Migration and Settling Debt through Collective Action in Mati Diop’s Atlantics.”

Richardson Award:  Kareem Joseph -  "The Evidence of Things Unseen: Black Detective Fiction and the Echos of The American Slave Narrative."

Richardson Award:  Apala Bhowmick -  “From Plantation to Laboratory: Ecological Vitality in Contemporary Postcolonial Fiction.”

Service & Leadership Award: Ariel Lawrence

2024:

Best Essay: Lucy Wallitsch - “‘For My Father is Still a Blind Man’: Disability, Precarity, and the Sublime.”

Best Essay: Ishanika Sharma - “First Blood: Menstrual Regulation and Murderous Rage in Nervous Conditions.”

Richardson Award:  Marguerite Adams - “Sound Bites: Satire in Black American and Afro-Caribbean Literatures, 1930-Present.”

2023:

Best Essay: Ishanika Sharma - “What Else is Left? Apokalis after Apocalypse in Animal’s People”

Richardson Award:  Ariel Lawrence - “Multivalent Memories: Towards an Ethical Reading of Black Women’s Lifewriting”

2022:

Best Essay: Kelly Duquette - “A soul hung up: Examining the Body in Marvell’s ‘A Dialogue between the Soul and Body’”

Richardson Award: Julian Currents - "Mapping a Chronopelago: The Temporal Ecologies of Caribbean Women’s Writing"

Richardson Award: Karlié Rodriguez - "Aesthetic Debts: Against Temporal Collapse and Toward Artistic Possibility in Post-María Puerto Rico"

Aldridge Award: Ra'Niqua Lee

2021:

Best Essay: Lauren Highsmith - "Riding Without Reigns: The Role of the Barbarian Horse in The Battle of Alcazar"

Best Essay: Ariel Lawrence - "Autobiography from the Graveyard: Kinship, Mourning, and Fugitivity in the Abyss"

Richardson Award: Lauren Highsmith - "Finding Black Futurity in Wondaland"

2020:

Best Essay:  John Gulledge - "Laughing With/At Cripple in The Fair Maid of the Exchange"

Richardson Award: Sophia Leonard - "Made in the Magazines: Truman Capote’s Early Nonfiction Writings"

Richardson Award: Jess Libow - "Political Movement: Ability, Sex, and Reform in the Nineteenth-Century U.S."

2019:

Best Essay:  Joshua Cohen - "That 'great pilot of ancient times': The Dangers of the Moses Complex in Invisible Man"

Richardson Award: Kayla Shipp-Kamibayashi - "The Secret Lives of Poems; or, Digital Inhabitations of Nineteenth-Century American Literature"

2018:

Best Essay:  Joshua Cohen - "Moses vs. the Masses: Alain Locke, Aesthetic Uplift, and Zora Neale Hurston"

Richardson Award: Joshua Cohen - "Echoes of Exodus: Biblical Typology and Racial Solidarity in African American Literature, 1829-1962" 

Richardson Award: Raleigh Mixon Robinson - "Between Stations: American Liberty and Locomotion from Walden to Plessy"

2017:

Best Essay:  Rachel Kolb - "The Brain’s ‘Instantaneous Inventions’: Exploring the Discursive Normalcy and Pathology of Mishearings"

Richardson Award:  Jimmy Worthy II - "Trustees of Defiance: Death, Resurrection, and Sacred Imperative in African American Literature"

Richardson Award: Nicole Morris - "Daughters of Hurston: Creolization as Performance from the Caribbean to the Sea Islands"

2016:

Best Essay:  Rachel Kolb - "Seeing Things Invisible to Moral Sight: The Interaction of Melancholy and Blindness in Milton's Poetry"

2015:

Best Essay:  Amy Elkins - "The ‘Fibre of Her Being’: H.D.’s Craft Modernism from Egypt to WWII"

Best Essay Honorable Mention: Jenny Bledsoe - "Fashioning Fleshly Connections: The Virgin, the Vernacular, and MS Royal 17 A. xxvii"

Richardson Award: Anthony Cooke - "'Walk Among Us': Moral Panics and the Deinstitutionalization of the Mentally Ill in Popular Culture"

2014:

Best Essay:  Dori Coblentz - "Twins in a Pinch: Pedagogy, Temporality, and Subjectivity in The Comedy of Errors"

Best Essay Honorable Mention: Hannah Markley - "Radical Translations: Drugs, Femininity, and the Construction of Textual Perceptibility in Les Paradis artificiels"

Richardson Award: Diana Louis - "Peculiar Institutions: Representations of Nineteenth-Century Black Women's Madness and Confinement in Slavery and Asylums"

2013:

Best Essay:  Emily Leithauser - "A History of the Persistence of Memory: Anthony Hecht’s ‘The Book of Yolek’"

2012:

Best Essay:  Amy Elkins - "Art and the Archive: Navigating Trauma in H.D.’s 'Within the Walls'"

2011:

Best Essay:  Margaret Greaves -"'The Old Folks at Home': Communal Homesickness in Irish Blackface Performance "

2010:

Best Essay:  Anthony Cooke - "Black Paranoia, Black Politics"

2009:

Best Essay: Alyssa Stalsberg - "The Politics of Feminist Nostalgia in Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebooks"

2008:

Best Essay: Karma De Gruy - "Desiring Angels: The Angelic Body in Paradise Lost"