Department of English
Nancy Rafetto Leach Sweeten Prize
Awarded annually for the best undergraduate essay on American Literature.
Read more about Nancy Rafetto Leach Sweeten.
2024
“The Perils of the Acculturation Gap: How Asian American Childhoods are Weaponized in the Neoliberal Racial Project”
2023
“Lost (and Found) in Translation: Misunderstanding and Transnational Collaboration in Ezra Pound’s Cathay”
2022
"Racial Triangulation and a Colonial Trace in the Stories of Hisaye Ysamamoto"
“The [Re]Construction of Space, Environment, and Race in the South: Faulkner and Ward"
2021
"Black Women's Burden of Expectations: The Politics of Respectability in Passing"
"Tradition More Authentic Than History: Freedom, Race, and Possession in George Washington Cable's Grandissimes"
2020
The Fallen Future is Chinese: Fears of Neoliberalism in the Techno-orientalist Themes of Ling Ma's Severance
The Sound of Belch'd Woods: "Song of Myself" As The American Epic
"His crudity is an exceeding great stench but it is America. To be frank, Whitman is to my fatherland what Dante is to Italy." --Ezra Pound
Zora Neale Hurston's Jonah's Gourd Vine: Family Dynamics and the Great Migration Narrative
2019
Remembering Deepwater Horizon: Ecological Afterlives in Sing, Unburied, Sing
2018
2017
'Not Essentially Different From [Her] Sex:' A Literary Reading of the Rebecca Buckley Ferguson Letters
A Broken Hallelujah: A critical addendum to Brodtkorb's "Selfhood and Others"
2015
2014
Syntax and Strangeness in Whitman's "Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night"
2013
Welty and the Tramp: The Formation of Loneliness in Eudora Welty's 'The Hitch-Hikers'
2012
Title: "Cantorian and Beautiful" Pragmatic Abstraction in David Foster Wallace
2011
Title: "I'm sane, you're not": Possibilities and Paradox of Passing in Charles Johnson's Oxherding Tale"
2010
Title: Identifying "The Thing Not Named": Narrative Absence and Consumer Culture in Cather's The Professor's House