GRADUATE student ESSAY PRIZE

SEASECS invites submissions for its annual Graduate Student Essay Prize competition. An award of $300 will be given for the best graduate student paper presented at the annual meeting of the society. Students currently enrolled in graduate programs (M.A. and PhD) and in all fields are invited to apply. All applicants must be members of SEASECS. Entries should be submitted as final versions of the paper, with complete citations and bibliographic information. Please submit entries (.docx or pdf) by 5:00 p.m. Central Standard Time on Saturday, April 5, 2025, to Dr. Lindsay Dunn at l.m.dunn@tcu.edu. Limit: 4500 words total.

2026 Winner: Ava Chuppe (Murray State), “Pamela, Evelina, and Feminine Selfhood in the Early Novel”

Runner up: Abigail Cordwel (Ole Miss), “From the Minerva Press to the Harlequin Romance: Suspense in Mass-Produced Narratives” offers a compelling and sophisticated comparison of Pamela and Evelina. Carefully researched and clearly structured, the essay advances a persuasive argument consistently supported by precise textual analysis and thoughtful engagement with relevant scholarship. Her use of feminist theory is particularly effective, allowing her to question established definitions of the novel while maintaining a clear and focused critical trajectory. One of the paper’s notable strengths lies in its nuanced engagement with literary history. By placing Burney in dialogue with earlier novelists such as Samuel Richardson, Ava not only highlights the continuities within the tradition but also demonstrates how Evelina revises and reimagines it. Her analysis of the relationship between the public and domestic spheres is especially insightful, revealing the broader stakes of her argument. Rather than resorting to simplistic contrasts, she offers a subtle reading of Evelina’s position, showing how questions of individuality and identity are shaped within a framework historically defined in masculine terms. Overall, this is an accomplished and intellectually ambitious paper. Ava’s ability to combine close reading, theoretical reflection, and historical awareness results in an argument that is both convincing and significant.

2025 Winner: Danielle Sensabaugh (University of Florida). Sensabaugh's essay, “(Un)virtuous Adornment: Mothers and Daughters at the Toilette in the 18th Century,” offers a rich discussion of toilette imagery featuring mothers and daughters, using these images as evidence for how daughters learned from their mothers. This project, most interestingly, included detailed visual analyses of paintings that were, in many cases, not well known to art historians. The committee noted that the essay was thoughtful, well-written, and engaging.  

Honorable mention: Laurie Drake (Mississippi State University). Drake's essay, “Lettered Mothering: The Missives of a Jewish Mother in Eighteenth Century America,” offers a narrative that recognizes and explores Jewish women in France and the ways in which they raised their children to embrace their religious identities.

2024 winner: Laura Drake (Mississippi State University). Drake’s essay, “‘Death in Its Power Reduces’: The Chatham Square Cemetery of Congregation Shearith Israel” represents an original contribution to understandings of religious diversity and toleration in colonial America. The beautifully framed paper draws on extensive and innovative archival research to make clear, nuanced arguments about the complex experiences of Jewish communities in colonial New York. 

Honorable Mentions: 1) Anna Kroon (Texas Tech University) for “Survivor Bias among Eighteenth-Century Chapbooks,” part of a massive archival undertaking that applies innovative research methods to understudied texts to increase our understanding of eighteenth-century readerships. 2) Tye Landels (Duke University) for “Articulations of Collective Shame in Early British Abolitionism,” which deftly negotiates the genre of the conference paper to share important learned analyses of writing about the slave trade in relation to British nationhood.

2023 Winner: Andrea Ferniany (University of Mississippi), “Disability and Feminine Performance in Frances Burney’s Camilla.” Honorable Mention: Alexandra Sausa (UT Knoxville), “Neurodivergence in Jane Austen’s Emma: The Narcissistic Heroine, Her Social ‘Blindness’ and ‘Blunders’.”

The committee also gives honorary mention to the essay by Alexandra Sausa, “Neurodivergence in Jane Austen’s Emma: The Narcissitic Heroine, Her Social ‘Blindness’ and ‘Blunders’.” The committee felt that the essay used a compelling theoretical frame to craft an interesting and innovative analysis of Emma, blending both primary and secondary texts on neurodivergence to create a critically engaged study.

2022 Winner: Jamie Kramer (University of Tennessee), “Seeking Passions from Synthetic Solitude: Visiting the Human and Automaton Hermits of England’s Garden Hermitages.” Honorable mention: Jacob Myers (University of Pennsylvania), “Adaptation, Anti-Heritage, and Illegibility in The Favourite (2018).”

2021 Winner: Ziona Kocher (University of Tennessee at Knoxville), "Pretty Young Gentleman: Age, Embodiment, and Queerness in The Country Wife." Honorable mention: Luke Vines, "Prophets and Readers: Samuel Johnson, John Ruskin, and a New History of Reading."

2020 Winner: Jennifer Ishee Hoffmann (Mississippi State University), “’I would not comply’: Coventanter Intransigeance and Religious Rhetoric in a Colonial Pennsylvania Captivity Narrative.”

2019 Winner: 2019: Annie Laura Persons (Virginia Commonwealth University), “The Parallel: or, Pilkington and Pope Compared.”

2018 Winner: Katherine Calvin (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), "Touching Watelet: L'Art de peindre and the Performance of Philosophical Materialism."

2017 Winner: Mariah Gruner (Boston University), "Transformative Emulation: Construction and Display of the Mobile Schoolgirl Self and Sampler."

2016 Winner: David Vinson (Auburn University), “The Extraordinary Afterlife of Major John André, the ‘Common Spy.’”

2015 Winner: Michael M. Wagoner (Florida State University), “The Merry Tragedy of Henry VII as written by Charles Macklin, Comedian.”

2014 Winner: Janet Min Lee (Columbia University), "'Her eyes sparkled on him': Allegorical Physiognomy in Henry Fielding's Jonathan Wild."

2012 Co-Winner: Clayton Tarr (University of Georgia) for “Framing the Gothic: Ann Radcliffe and Narrative Boundaries.”

2012 Co-Winner: Shelby Johnson (University of Tennessee), “Reclaiming History’s Terra Incognita: Frances Burney, The Wanderer, and Race.”