Essay Awards

• 2023: Megan Crognale, Fairfield University, "Narrating the Nation: Language and the Landscape of Time in Scego's Adua"
• 2022: Rebecca Arbele, Tufts University, "How Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass Teaches through Storytelling, Science, and Metaphor"
  
• 2021: Luis Medina Cordova, King's College, London, "An Ecuadorian World Novel? Considering Gabriela Alemán's Humo as World Literature"
• 2020: Dr. Aoise Stratford, "Abortion, Infanticide, Sterilization and the Monstrous Maternal in Suzan-Lori Parks's Red Letter Plays"
• 2019: Robert Wilson, SUNY Binghamton, "Strike Again that Sounding String: James M. Whitfield and Contrapuntal Dissonance" and Rachel Paparone, Ithaca College, "A(r)cadie heureuse? Space, Place, and Engaged Pastoral in Zachary Richard’s Feu"
• 2018: Melissa J. Strong, Community College of Philadelphia, "Found Time: Kairos in A Visit from the Goon Squad"
• 2017: Michele Martinez, Harvard University, "Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Picture-and-Frame Designs as Victorian Comics"
• 2016: Dale Tracy, Royal Military College of Canada, "Observing Heroes and Shifting Stories in David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas"
• 2015: Alex Miller, Independent Scholar, "Beyond Postmodernism: Satire and Compassion in the ‘Degraded Cosmos’ of George Saunders’s America"
• 2014: Colin Carman, Colorado Mountain College, "Godwin’s Fleetwood, Shame, and the Sexuality of Feeling"
  
• 2013: Marisa Palacios Knox, University of California, Berkeley, "Literary Nunneries: Women’s Education, Sterility and Detachment"
  
• 2012: Patrick Maley, The College of New Jersey
  
• 2011: Hunter Vaughan, Washington University in St. Louis
  
• 2010: Fran Lassiter, Montgomery County Community College, "Journey to Equality: From Maria W. Stewart to Barack Obama"
• 2008: Aaron Ritzenberg, Yale University, "Holding on to the Sentimental in Winesburg, Ohio"
• 2006: Katsura Sako, University of Warwick, "A. S. Byatt’s ‘Half-Resurrection’ in Possession: A Romance"

• 2023: Kaitlin Moore, University of Wisconsin-Madison, "'I'm traversing my own death throes': Haunting the Queer Spacetime(s) of Dear Esther"
• 2022: Lorenzo Bartolucci, Stanford University, "Landscape in the Shadow: The Self in 1974"
  
• 2021: Lucas Wilson, Florida Atlantic University, "'Remember, my house it’s also your house too': Postmemorial Structures in Art Spiegelman's Maus"
• 2020: W. Danielle Jones, University of Chicago, "Kindred, Literacy, and the Body as Text"
  
• 2019: Miles Osgood, Harvard University, "Revising Character, Revisionist History: Clarissa, Marlow, Stephen, Quentin, Bilbo"
  
• 2018: Bethany Doane, Penn State, "Planetary Ecohorror and Sublime Annihilation"
  
• 2017: Amanda R. Waugh Lagji, University of Massachusetts Amherst, "'Now' is Here: Disillusionment and Urgency in Anita Desai's Cry, the Peacock"
  
• 2016: Jeremy Colangelo, University of Western Ontario, "For the Progress of ‘Faustus and Helen’: Crane, Whitman, and the Metropolitan Progress Poem"
• 2015: Krista A. Murchison, University of Ottawa, "‘Understand from that Single Word Many’: Thirteenth-Century Women’s Vernacular Literacy and the Style of Ancrene Wisse"
  
• 2014: Casey Hayman, University of Massachusetts Amherst, "Hypervisible Man: Techno-Performativity and Televisual Blackness in Percival Everett’s I Am Not Sidney Poitier"
  
• 2013: Nick Henry and Juliane Schicker, Pennsylvania State University, “Heimatsehnsucht: Rammstein and the Search for Cultural Identity"
  
• 2012: Yvonne Franke, University of Pittsburgh
  Ann M. Mazur, University of Virginia, Runner up
  
• 2011: Kristen Proehl, College of William and Mary
  Arielle Zibrak, Boston University, Runner-up
• 2010: Sarah Birge, Pennsylvania State University, "Non-cognitive Continuity: Bodily Memory, Amnesia, and Alzheimer’s Disease"
• 2010 Honorable Mention: Perin Gurel, Yale University, "Sing, O Djinn!: Memory, History, and Folklore in The Bastard of Istanbul"
• 2009: Christopher Schmidt, The Graduate Center, CUNY, "Warhol’s Leftovers: Waste, Recycling, and the Female Writing Machine"
• 2007: Robert Azzarello, "Unnatural Predators: Queer Theory Meets Environmental Studies in Bram Stoker’s Dracula"
• 2006: Jen Cadwallader, University of North Carolina, "Spirit Photography and the Victorian Culture of Mourning"
• 2005: Lisa Perdigao, "Dismembered Muse: Seamus Heaney’s ‘The Golden Bough,’ ‘The Cure At Troy,’ and ‘Mycenae Lookout’"
  

• 2023: Sayanti Mondal, Illinois State University, "The Gaze of the Margin: Agency, Identity, and the Postcolonial Storyteller"
• 2023 Honorable Mention: Omotoyosi Esther Odukomaiya, Southern Illinois University, "Africanfuturism: Disrupting the Science Fiction Genre"
• 2023 Honorable Mention: Shelby Ward, Tusculum University, "Geographies of Pleasure: A Feminist Critique on Hospitality, Cosmopolitanism, and Postcolonialism in Sri Lankan Tourist Materials"
• 2022: Shanaaz Mohammed, Davidson College, "Coralization: Coral Materiality in Khal Torabully's Poetry"
  
• 2021: Rituparna Mitra, Emerson College, "Precarious Duniyas in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness: Life, Death and Repair in ‘Ruin-Worlds.'"
• 2021 Honorable Mention: Mary Cook, Lake Tahoe Community College, "On Reading Transformative Transnational Memoirs: A Study of Personal and Political Histories in Edwidge Danticat's Brother, I’m Dying"
• 2020: Ngwaba Ijeoma Ann, Federal University of Oye Ekiti, "Re-writing the Nation: History and Re-Historicisation in Chinua Achebe’s There Was a Country and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun"
• 2019: Kate Perillo, University of Massachusetts Amherst, "A Room Not One's Own: CLR James, Jean Rhys, and Anticolonial Imagination in the London Lodging House"
  
• 2018: Ayendy Bonifacio, Ohio State University, "¿A’ca’o Qué, Comadre?”: Border Languages, Xicanisma, and Ciudadanía in Ana Castillo’s So Far from God"
  
• 2017: Kate Perillo, University of Massachusetts Amherst, "The Speculative Caribbean: Technological Futurity in Nalo Hopkinson’s Midnight Robber and Beyond"
  
• 2016: Stanka Radovic, University of Toronto, Mississauga, "'A Rose by Any Other Name’: Naming and Location in Caribbean Literature"
  
• 2015: Suzi Cater, New York University, "Don’t Trust the Author: Suspect Texts in Édouard Glissant’s Tout-monde"
  
• 2014: Laurie Lambert, University of California, Davis, "Romancing the Revolution: Black Radicalism and the Immigrant Writer in the Work of Dionne Brand"

• 2023: Callie Ingram, SUNY University at Buffalo, "Writing against Encounter: Jennifer Egan on New Sincerity and Gendered Violence"
• 2023 Honorable Mention: Galen David Bunting, Northeastern University, "An Indefinite Line: Shell-shock, Disability, and the Remaking of Masculinity after the Great War"
• 2022: Samadrita Kuiti, University of Connecticut-Storrs, "Anticipating the Afrotopia: Queer Monsters and Utopian Futurities in Nnedi Okorafor's Lagoon"
• 2022 Honorable Mention: Dolores Batten, University of Central Florida, "The Problematics of the Postcolonial? Identity: Embracing Linguistics, Culture, and Pre-Feminism in Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God"
• 2021: Stephanie Papa, Université Sorbonne Paris Nord, “Crafting Somatic Communication: The Kinetics of Motherhood in Layli Long Soldier’s Poetry”
• 2020: Nancy Vera, University of Maryland College Park, “Witches & Tricksters: Feminine Forms of Resistance in Afro-Mexican Folklore”
• 2019: Nancy Kang, University of Manitoba, "Sin Sexo: Auto-Historiography and Reproduction in Alicia Gaspar de Alba’s Sor Juana’s Second Dream”
• 2018: Molly Ferguson, Ball State University, "The First Five Minutes: Teaching with Twitter in the Feminist Classroom"
• 2017: Jessica MacEachern, Université de Montréal, "Warped Visions of Time and Place: H.D. Re-Visions Sensory History"
• 2016: Nicole Gervasio, Columbia University, "The Power of the Weak Signifier: Wordsworth Lucy in J.M. Coetzee's and Kincaid’s Decolonizing Fictions"
• 2015: Mary Ellen Iatropoulos, Independent Scholar, "‘Laughing and Crying Behind Her Mask’: Code-Switching and Sentimental Strategy in Fanny Fern’s Ruth Hall"
• 2014: Victoria Muñoz, Ohio State University, "Female Translators and Their Detractors: Theories of Early Modern Translation in Development"
• 2014 Honorable Mention: Kara Johnson, Northwestern University, "‘A pure young voice’: Textual Performance in the Journals of Frances & Mary Willard”
• 2013: Marisa Palacios Knox, University of California, Berkeley, "Literary Nunneries: Women’s Education, Sterility and Detachment"
• 2012: Melissa A. Schaub, University of North Carolina at Pembroke
• 2011: Christopher Byrne, McGill University
• 2010: Daniel Moore, Queen’s College, "Mourning the Mourners: Gender Politics of Commemoration in the First World War"
• 2009: Zachary Hutchins, University of North Carolina, "The Wisdom of Anne Bradstreet: Exchanging Eve’s Legacy for Elizabeth’s"
• 2009 GLBTQ Caucus Essay Award: Bryan Conn, Johns Hopkins University, "The Terror of Love: Race and Sex in James Baldwin’s Another Country"
• 2008: Catherine Keyser, University of South Carolina, "Keeping Ironic Company: Mary McCarthy and the Smart Woman in Politics"
• 2008 GLBTQ Caucus Essay Award: Wendy Pawlak, "The Lonely View from the Closet: Lesbianism in The Bostonians and the Inevitable Doom of Olive Chandler"
• 2007:Shari Evans, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, "Fortress, Haven, Home: Programmed Space, Themed Space, and the Ethics of Home in Toni Morrison’s Paradise"
• 2007 Honorable Mention: Lynn Johnson, Dickinson College, "Traversing the Oceanic: The Garret as a Vehicle of Transport in Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861)"
• 2006: Stephanie Harzewski, University of Pennsylvania, "A New Bildungsroman: Chick Lit Authors and Their Characters"
• 2006 GLBTQ Caucus Essay Award: David Jarroway, "George Cukor and Filmic Collaboration: Subjective Displacement in America’s Postwar Years”
• 2005: Beth Capo, "Can This Marriage Be Saved? Birth Control and Marriage in Modern American Literature"
• 2005 Honorable Mention: Elizabeth Abele, Nassau Community College, "The Open Range: Jane Smiley Reclaims the Feminine Western Tradition"

Earlier WGSC Essay Award Winners

• Ruth Bienstock Anolik, Haverford College, “The Missing Mother: Negotiations of Motherhood in the Gothic Mode”
• Catherine Golden, Skidmore College, "Late-Twentieth-Century Readers in Search of a Dickensian Heroine: Angels, Fallen Sisters, and Eccentric Women"
• Michael R. Schiavi, New York Institute of Technology, "Gay and Lesbian Caucus Essay Prize for “Teaching The Boys: Mart Crowley in the Millennial Classroom"
• Elizabeth Fekete, Northwestern University, "Graduate Student Caucus Essay Prize for “Imagined Revolution: The Female Reader and The Wide, Wide World"
• Ruth Bienstock Anolik, Haverford College, "Appropriating the Golem, Possessing the Dybbuk: Stories of Power and Creation by Jewish-American Women"
• Honorable Mention: Diane M. Garno, Wayne State University, "Elevating His Mistress to a Utopian Wife: Cabt and Denise in Icaria"