English Department Prizes
For more information regarding the listed awards, contact Loretta M. Williams in the English Department at: loretta@english.upenn.edu. The deadline for submissions varies from year to year, this year's deadline is NOON, TUESDAY, MARCH 20th.
The Annual Student Essay Prize requirements are the following:
1. Only one entry per student per prize. If you enter two contests, you must submit one essay for each contest.
2. Please do not submit the same essay for more than one prize.
3. Submit two printed copies of each submitted essay to the Department of English at Fisher-Bennett Hall Suite 127 room 130. There are no minimum or maximum lengths.
4. Essays from Spring 2012, Fall 2011, Spring 2011 or Fall 2010 are eligible.
College Alumni Society Henry Reed Prize
Awarded for the best essay written by an undergraduate on the literature of the English Renaissance. The deadline is usually beginning of March; interested students should contact the department with questions.
Title: Battered or Battering? Sexual Roles in Donne's Sonnets
Title: Prompt: Jacobean drama was 'troubled with the mother' - that is, the plays express considerable anxiety about the maternal." Discuss the representation of motherhood in Jacobean Theater.
Title: Discontinuous Biblical Reading Practices"
Title: "An Apology for Difficult Poetry: The Politics of Glossing in Spenser's Shepharde's Calendar"
Title: "Shadows in The Garden"
Dosoretz Family Prize
Awarded annually for the best essay written by a graduating senior English major. The deadline is usually beginning of March; interested students should contact the department with questions.
Title: 'Minds unhing'd from old faith and love': Self-Forgetfulness, Memory and Social Redemption in the Works of George Eliot.
Title: Re-rewriting the Gothic: Christabel and the Lucy Poems
Title: "The Philosophers and the Animals": Opening gaps in reason with teh inarticulate voice.
Title: "Putting the Salt Back Inside Sozaboy"
Title: "'Do Thyself No Harm!' Suicide in Richardson's Clarissa and Eighteenth-Century Religious Discourse"
L. Barry Pick Prize for Best Undergraduate Thesis
Awarded annually for the best thesis written by a student in the English Honors Program. The deadline is usually end of March; interested students should contact the English Honors Director with questions.
Title: "Remains Without Remaining': Trauma and Melancholia in the Design, Construction, and Destruction of Holocaust Memorials."
Title: "Out of the Past and onto the Screen: Christopher Nolan and Blockbuster Noir"
Title: "Guts: On Jack Spicer, Robin Blaser, and a Poetics of Masochism"
Title: "Representing Church and State: Paratexts of the Authorized Elizabethan Bible"
Title: "In the Wake of a Fair Use Trial: Incest, Citation and the Legal Legacy of Finnegans Wake"
Nancy Rafetto Leach P. Sweeten Prize
Awarded annually for the best undergraduate essay on American Literature. The deadline is usually beginning of March; interested students should contact the department with questions.
Title: "Cantorian and Beautiful" Pragmatic Abstraction in David Foster Wallace
Title: "I'm sane, you're not": Possibilities and Paradox of Passing in Charles Johnson's Oxherding Tale"
Title: "Love in Black-American Prison Literature"
Title: Identifying "The Thing Not Named": Narrative Absence and Consumer Culture in Cather's The Professor's House
Phillip E. Goldfein Class of '34 Shakespearean Prize
Awarded for the best undergraduate paper on Shakespeare. The deadline is usually beginning of March; interested students should contact the department with questions.
Title: "Variant Configurations of Kingship in Q and F Lear"
Title: "Shakespeare's Lives: Anthony, Cleopatra, and Appropriation"
Title: "Very tragical mirth": Ovidian Desire in A MIdsummer Night's Dream
Title: "The Art of Life: Artistic Mimesis and Biological Reproduction in the Works of Ovid and Shakespeare"
Rittenberg Prize for Best Undergraduate Student in English
Awarded annually for overall excellence and achievement by a Senior English Major.