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.
Nancy Rafetto Leach P. Sweeten Prize
2023
Essay Title: “Tempering Abolition: John Wesley, Anthony Benezet, and Slavery as Dis-Ease”
2022
Title: "The Haunted House of Citizenship: His House and the Hostile Environment"
2021
2020
2019
"The Parasitical Trick: Colonial Encounters between Mary Rowlandson and James Printer"
2018
"Counter-Obsolescence from the Window: James Schuyler and the Urban Curative Imaginary,”
2017
"Seeing Conspiracy: Racial Violence and the Forms of White Supremacy in Charles Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition"
2016
“Sounding Animal and Cyborg Others: Race and Alternate Alterities in Cathy Park Hong’s Translating Mo’um and John Yau’s Ing Grish, My Symptoms, and Borrow Love Poems.”
2015
"Realism and the Social Bind: Charles Chesnutt, Individualism and Statistics"
2014
2013
2012
"One More Time with Feeling: Reiterative Memorials and Reparative History in William Wells"