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Nancy Rafetto Leach P. Sweeten Prize

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The Sweeten Prize recognizes the best essay in American Literature submitted by a graduate student in English within the last calendar year. Entries are nominated and submitted by faculty, and essays are judged by two faculty members.

Sweeten Award Recipients

2023

Eileen Ying (recipient)

Essay Title: “Tempering Abolition: John Wesley, Anthony Benezet, and Slavery as Dis-Ease”

2022

Asa Seresin (recipient)

Title: "The Haunted House of Citizenship: His House and the Hostile Environment"

2021

Andrew Smyth (recipient)

"Julia Fields and the Poetics of Engulfment"

2020

Ann Ho (recipient)

"Fugitive Authorship: Non-synchronism and segregation in Fran Ross's Oreo"

2019

Ethan Plaue (recipient)

"The Parasitical Trick: Colonial Encounters between Mary Rowlandson and James Printer"

2018

Davy Knittle (recipient)

"Counter-Obsolescence from the Window: James Schuyler and the Urban Curative Imaginary,”

2017

Ajay Kumar Batra (recipient)

"Seeing Conspiracy: Racial Violence and the Forms of White Supremacy in Charles Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition"

2016

Ashley Chang (recipient)

“Sounding Animal and Cyborg Others: Race and Alternate Alterities in Cathy Park Hong’s Translating Mo’um and John Yau’s Ing GrishMy Symptoms, and Borrow Love Poems.”

 

2015

Alex Eisenthal (recipient)

"Realism and the Social Bind: Charles Chesnutt, Individualism and Statistics"

2014

Chris Mustazza (recipient)

"Vachel Lindsay and the W. Cabell Greet Recordings: An Introduction"

2013

Joan Lubin (recipient)

"Critical Intimacy/Critical Inquiry"

2012

Laura Soderberg (recipient)

"One More Time with Feeling: Reiterative Memorials and Reparative History in William Wells"

2011

Christopher Taylor (recipient)

"Sharing Time: C.L.R. James and Southern Agrarian Movements"

2010

Jonathan Fedors (co-recipient)
Vaclav Paris (co-recipient)

2009

Rachel Banner (recipient)