Department of English
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.
2024
“Dweorgas and Dvergir: Disease, Disorder, and Deviance in Old English and Norse Literature”
2023
“The Experience is Dialect”: Narrative and Resistive Possibilities of Pidgin in
All I Asking For Is My Body and Rolling the R’s
Unseamly Girlhoods: Restitching Shirley Jackson’s Hangsaman With Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl
2022
Honorable Mention for a Critical Creative Honors Thesis
"Translating the Music of Melancholy in Victor Hugo's 'Demain, Dés l' Aube'"
"The Relational Body in Margaret Cavendish's Philosophy: 'New Materialism' and a Feminist History of Science"
2021
"'What No Book of Travels Could Inform You of': Constructing the Female Eye Witness in OROONOKO, OR THE ROYAL SLAVE and THE TURKISH EMBASSY LETTERS"
"When Humanity Falls Apart: The Black Women Who Emerge from Poetic Chaos"
2020
"Payment Received in Full": Women's Labor Contributions to the Philadelphia Printing Industry at the turn of the 19th Century
2019
“A Nature Like Some Mighty River”: Historical Difference and Readerly Subjectivity in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss
2018
"Medicine's Split Face": Pat Barker's Regeneration Trilogy and Wartime
"From Fact and Reason": Student Notes by Christopher Hedrick, University of Pennsylvania, 1788-1792
"The Hedgehog and the Highway: Derrida and Knowing the Animal in Poetry"
"Black Travel through Time and Space: Music Videos from Sun Ra to Erykah Badu"
2017
Introduction to "Pastorcillos", or "Little Shepherds:" Exploring a Miscellaneous Manuscript Book from Spain's Early Modern Period
2016
"'Another, Then Another': Gay Male Orgy and Political Futurity"
2015
2014
"Re-enacting Self, State and Trauma: Civil War Memory and John Brown's Body 1913-1964:
Trawing in Silences: Intimacy and Authority in the Writing of Junot Diaz
Quoting Poetry in Contemporary Drama: Poetry as Resurrection, and Redemption from Death
2013
"The Politics of Crosshatching: Formal Hybridity in Natasha Trethewey's Native Guard"
2012
Title: "Out of the Past and onto the Screen: Christopher Nolan and Blockbuster Noir"
Title: "Remains Without Remaining': Trauma and Melancholia in the Design, Construction, and Destruction of Holocaust Memorials."
2011
Title: "Guts: On Jack Spicer, Robin Blaser, and a Poetics of Masochism"
Title: "Representing Church and State: Paratexts of the Authorized Elizabethan Bible"
2010
Title: "In the Wake of a Fair Use Trial: Incest, Citation and the Legal Legacy of Finnegans Wake"