Prizes for Graduate Students
The Poetry Prizes: All registered students, graduate or undergraduate, may compete for the Academy of American Poets prize (for the best poem or group of poems, unpublished or published in a university magazine), the Cook prize (for the best unpublished poem or group of poems), and the Gordon Barber Memorial prize for poetry. Students may submit up to six pages of poetry. If your poems are many but short it is better to select four to five pages of your best. Submit poetry entries in triplicate. The deadline is April 20, 2023 at noon. For further information, visit the English department’s Undergraduate Prizes page, and follow instructions for Category A-2.
The Noah Webster Essay Prize: The Noah Webster Prize is awarded annually to a graduate student for an essay on some aspect of the English Language. Since we do not regularly offer a graduate seminar in the History of the Language, we have traditionally been very liberal in our judgment of what constitutes an aspect of that subject. An essay that touches in any way on the English language of any period is eligible for submission. To be considered, please submit an anonymous copy of your essay to writingcourseapplications@yale.edu, along with an additional, separate copy of your title page that includes your name and email address. One entry per student. The deadline is August 1, 2023.
The Elizabethan Club Award: The Yale University Elizabethan Club awards a prize for the best graduate student term paper and/or dissertation on a subject of interest to the Club:
- Outstanding work on literature, arts, or culture of the Renaissance.
- Outstanding work on interpretations, adaptations, or criticism relating to literature, arts, and culture of the Renaissance.
- Outstanding work based on research done in the Elizabethan Club Collection (used at the Beinecke Library).
Work from any department is eligible and nominations can come from faculty, advisors, or the students themselves. The competition is open to all Yale students, regardless of department. They do not need to be members of the Club.
The winner will receive a monetary prize.
In order to be considered for this prize, the following deadline must be met:
By 4 p.m. on Friday, April 21, 2023: Submit an electronic copy of no more than sixty double-spaced typed pages of a completed paper or dissertation by sending it as an email attachment to the registrar for the Program in Early Modern Studies, Julia DiVincenzo. Please use the subject line “Elizabethan Essay Prize, Graduate Student.” [Papers received after 4 p.m. that day cannot be considered because of the tight deadlines under which the selection committees operate.]
Please contact Julia DiVincenzo with questions or for additional information regarding the prize.
The Departmental Essay Prize for Excellence in Coursework: This competition is open to all graduate students in our department who have taken course work this year in which they produced essays of which they are especially proud. Entries may be revised from the form in which they were first submitted. To be considered, please submit an anonymous copy of your essay (without instructor’s comments) to writingcourseapplications@yale.edu, along with an additional, separate copy of your title page that includes your name and email address. One entry per student. The deadline is August 1, 2023.
The Departmental Prize for the Best Essay Accepted for Publication: Open to all graduate students in the English department for essays that have been accepted for publication or have actually been published during the current academic year. To be considered, please email two files to writingcourseapplications@yale.edu: 1) an anonymous copy of your essay including the name of the journal or book in which the essay is or will be published; and 2) a copy of the title page that includes your name and email address. One entry per student. The deadline is May 31, 2023.
CONGRATULATIONS to the following students who have won departmental and university prizes this year for their excellent work as teachers, poets and literary critics!
2022-2023 Prize Winners
Michael Abraham: Janice Carlisle Prize for Excellence in Teaching at Yale (honorable mention)
Ben Card: Elizabethan Club Essay Prize for “Reading for Heresy in the Career of Thomas Barlow”
Michelle Chow: Noah Webster Prize for “Rhetoric of War: Ekphrasis as Imaginary Documentary in Mai Der Vang’s Yellow Rain”
Peter Conroy: Departmental Prize for the Best Dissertation of the Year for “Unreconciled: American Power and the End of History, 1945 to the Present”
Maia Lwin: Departmental Essay Prize for Excellence in Coursework for “Fantasy and Confinement in The Birdcage”
Sophie Richardson: Elizabethan Club Essay Prize for “Reading the Surface in Early Modern English Literature” and Janice Carlisle Prize for Excellence in Teaching at Yale
Colton Valentine: Departmental Prize for the Best Essay Accepted for Publication for “Illness as Character as Metaphor”
Cirũ Wainaina: Janice Carlisle Prize for Excellence in Teaching at Yale
2021-2022 Prize Winners
Anna Hill: Janice Carlisle Prize for Excellence in Teaching at Yale and Departmental Prize for the Best Essay Accepted for Publication (honorable mention) for “Toward a Future Imperfect: Environmental Crisis and the Late-Twentieth-Century American Road Narrative”
Eve Houghton: Elizabethan Club Prize for “ ‘I am always sorry to antagonize collectors”: Henrietta Bartlett and the 1916 Census of Shakespeare Quartos”
Samuel Huber: Departmental Prize for the Best Dissertation of the Year for “Every Day About the World: Feminist Internationalism in the Second Wave”
Stephanie Kelley: Noah Webster Prize for “Hurston’s Harlem Garment”
Maeva O’Brien: Departmental Essay Prize for Excellence in Coursework for “The Marrow of Tradition and Post-Reconstruction Racial Public Formation”
Melissa Tu: Noah Webster Prize for “Virtual Sensing in Lyric Space: First-Person Voice Effects in Late Medieval English Lyric”
Colton Valentine: Departmental Prize for the Best Essay Accepted for Publication for “Vernon Lee, Queer Relations, and a New Guard of Victorianist Multilingualism”
2020-2021 Prize Winners
Wing Chun Julia Chan: Departmental Prize for the Best Dissertation of the Year for “Veritable Utopia: Revolutionary Russia and the Modernism of the British Left”
David de León: Sylvia Ardyn Boone Prize for the best graduate essay or dissertation dealing with African or African American artistic, cultural, and/or historical issues for “Epic Black: Poetics in Protest in the Time of Black Lives Matter”
Clio Doyle: Noah Webster Prize for “The Salad and The Book-Fish: Metaphors and Materials of Early Modern Books”
Julian Durkin: Departmental Essay Prize for Excellence in Coursework for “Marvell at Nature’s Jarring Harmony” and Noah Webster Prize (honorable mention) for ”Pope’s Second Nature”
Trina Hyun: Best Essay Accepted for Publication
Larissa Tsukamoto: Janice Carlisle Prize for Excellence in Teaching at Yale
Imani Tucker: Departmental Essay Prize for Excellence in Coursework for Gestures Toward a Theory of the Lesbian Caricature”
Sarah Weston: Fred Strebeigh and Linda H. Peterson Prize for Excellence in Teaching at Yale
2019-2020 Prize Winners
Carlos Nugent: Departmental Prize for the Best Dissertation of the Year for “Imagined Environments: Mediating Race and Nature in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands”
Brittany Levingston: Departmental Prize for the Best Dissertation of the Year (honorable mention) for “In the Day of Salvation: Christ and Salvation in Early Twentieth-Century African American Literature”
Anna Shechtman: Departmental Prize for the Best Dissertation of the Year (honorable mention) for “The Media Concept: A Genealogy”
Christopher McGowan: Departmental Prize for the Best Essay Accepted for Publication for “Workers Entering the Prison: Steve McQueen’s Hunger (2008) as Imperial Labor Film”
Arthur Wang: Departmental Prize for the Best Essay Accepted for Publication for “Situation, Occasion, Encounter: Citizen and Lyric Theory in the Historical Present”
Carlos Nugent: Best Essay Accepted for Publication (honorable mention) for “Modernist Institutions, Modern Infrastructures, and the Making of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands”
Chelsie Malyszek: Noah Webster Prize for “The Wrong Word: Substitution and Synonymy in American Surrealist Poetry”
James Doty: Noah Webster Prize for “Past All Expectations: Theories of Poetic Ugliness in Robert Browning’s Dramatic Monologues”
Eve Houghton: Departmental Essay Prize for Excellence in Coursework for “Common Interests: Political Parties and Aesthetic Community in Shaftesbury’s Sensus Communis (1711)”
Lacey Jones: Departmental Essay Prize for Excellence in Coursework for “Aesthetic Teleology: Victorian Symbols, Victorian Ends”
2018-2019 Prize Winners
Seo Hee Im: Departmental Prize for the Best Dissertation of the Year for “After Totality: Late Modernisms and the Globalization of the Novel”
Alex Reider: Departmental Prize for the Best Essay Accepted for Publication for “Ic ane geseah idese sittan: The Woman and Women Apart in Old English Poetry” and Noah Webster Prize (honorable mention) for “The Bilingual Exeter Book of Old English Poetry”
Julia Chan: Departmental Prize for the Best Essay Accepted for Publication for “The Brave New Worlds of Birth Control: Women’s Travel in Soviet Russia and Naomi Mitchison’s We Have Been Warned”
Eve Houghton: Noah Webster Prize for “ ‘So long and tedious, in a stile not usuall’: Form and Compromise in Richard Hooker’s Lawes of Ecclesiastical Politie”
Chelsie Malyszek: Noah Webster Prize (honorable mention) for “Auden’s Root Systems: ‘Bucolics’ and the Etymological Sublime”
Lizzie Mundell Perkins: Departmental Essay Prize for Excellence in Coursework for “Re-reading for the plot: The Golden Bowl (1904) and the grammar of knowledge”
Andrew Brown: Elizabethan Club Dissertation Prize for “Artificial Persons: Fictions of Representation in Early Modern Drama”
2017-2018 Prize Winners
Carla Baricz: Elizabethan Club Dissertation Prize for “Early Modern Two-Part and Sequel Drama, 1490-1590”
Jason Bell: Departmental Prize for the Best Dissertation of the Year for “Archiving Displacement in America”
Andrew Brown: Departmental Prize for the Best Essay Accepted for Publication for “Marina and the Market for Shakespeare in Eighteenth-Century Performance (Eighteenth-Century Studies 51.2, Winter 2018) and Noah Webster Prize (honorable mention) for “Paradise Found: Quakerism, Metadiscourse, and the Language of Seventeenth-Century Life Writing”
Daniel de la Rocha: Noah Webster Prize (honorable mention) for “Jane Austen and the Language of Romantic Rapture”
Israel Kassim: Academy of American Poets Prize and Albert Stanborough Cook Prize for “Africa Talks to You” and other pieces
Shu-han Luo: Noah Webster Prize for “The Instability of Poetry and the Tree of Life”
Chelsie Malyszek: Noah Webster Prize for “Diction in the Dictionary: Marianne Moore’s Definition Poems”
Kate Needham: Departmental Prize for Excellence in Coursework for “ ‘These few disordered Iliades’: George Chapman and the Fragmentation of Epic”
Helen Yang: Departmental Prize for Excellence in Coursework for “The Vessel as Agent and Vehicle of Mimetic Exchange in the Construction of the Postcolonial Identity in Sea of Poppies”
2016-2017 Prize Winners
Anya Adair: Departmental Prize for the Best Dissertation of the Year for “Composing the Law: Literature and Legislation in Early Medieval England”
Peter Conroy: Departmental Prize for Excellence in Coursework for “The Satire of False Needs: A Geneaology”
Clay Greene: Noah Webster Prize for work in the history of the language for “The Rudiments of Creation: James Weldon Johnson’s Poetic Surface”
Tobi Haslett: Departmental Prize for Excellence in Coursework for “ ‘Painted Music’: Maud Martha and the Sensorium of Black Class Aspiration”
Brad Holden: Elizabethan Club Dissertation Prize for “Milton between the Reformation and Enlightenment: Religion in the Age of Revolution”
Trina Hyun: Noah Webster Prize (honorable mention) for “Thing Theology”
Andrew Kau: Departmental Prize for the Best Dissertation of the Year for “Astraea’s Adversary: The Rivalry Between Law and Literature in Elizabethan England”
Palmer Rampell: Departmental Prize for the Best Essay Accepted for Publication for “The Science Fiction of Roe v. Wade (1973)”
Alexandra Reider: Noah Webster Prize for “ ‘Bless Us! What a Word on a Title Page Is This!’: Linguistic Purism and Milton’s English Verse”
Rebecca Rush: Departmental Prize for the Best Essay Accepted for Publication for “Licentious Rhymers: John Donne and the Late-Elizabethan Couplet Revival”
2015-2016 Prize Winners
Jordan Brower: Departmental Prize for the Best Dissertation of the Year for “A Literary History of the Studio System, 1911-1950”
Clio Doyle: Departmental Prize for Excellence in Coursework for “let us now fish out the reason’: the Book-Fish in and around Seventeenth-Century Cambridge”
Matthew Hunter: Elizabethan Club Award for criticism on a Renaissance topic for “The Pursuit of Style in Shakespeare’s Drama”
Seo Hee Im: Departmental Prize for the Best Essay Accepted for Publication (honorable mention) for “Between Habbakuk and Locke: Pain, Debt, and Economic Subjectivation in Paradise Lost” (Modern Language Quarterly 78, no. 1 (2017): 1–25)
Shu-Han Luo: Noah Webster Prize for “Tears for Abraham? The Sacrifice of Isaac in Anglo-Saxon Imagination”
Natalie Prizel: Departmental Prize for the Best Essay Accepted for Publication for “’The Dead Man Come to Life Again’: Edward Albert and the Strategies of Black Endurance” (Victorian Literature and Culture)
Alexandra Reider: Noah Webster Prize for “Charles d’Orleans and His English Books”
Rebecca Rush: Elizabethan Club Award for criticism on a Renaissance topic for “Licentious Rhymers: John Donne and the Late-Elizabethan Couplet Revival”
Arthur Wang: Departmental Prize for Excellence in Coursework for “Occasion, Situation, Encounter: Citizen: An American Lyric and the Lyric Historical Present”
2014-2015 Prize Winners
Anya Adair: Prize Teaching Fellowship recognizing outstanding performance and promise as a teacher and Noah Webster Prize for “Swift, Satire and the Second Person Pronoun”
Jordan Brower: Departmental Prize for the Best Essay Accepted for Publication for “The Mill on the Floss, Riparian Law, and the Difficulty of Judgment” (English Literary History, Vol 83, No 1, 2016)
Andrew Brown: Departmental Prize for the Best Essay Accepted for Publication for “ ‘Being Unseminared’: Pleasure, Instruction, and Playing the Queen in Anthony and Cleopatra (book chapter for Shakespeare and Consciousness, eds. Paul Budra and Clifford Werier, Ashgate, 2016)
Samuel Fallon: Departmental Prize for the Best Dissertation of the Year for “Personal Effects: Persona and Literary Culture in Elizabethan England”
Matthew Hunter: Noah Webster Prize for “City Comedy, Public Style”
Anna Shechtman: Departmental Prize for Excellence in Coursework for “J.D. Salinger’s White Writing: Authenticity and the Tone of Late Capitalism”
Justin Sider: Departmental Prize for the Best Dissertation of the Year for “Parting Words: Address and Exemplarity in Victorian Poetry”
2013-2014 Prize Winners
Andrew Brown: Departmental Prize for Excellence in Coursework for “’Several Ladies of Quality’: Lillo, the Ladies, and the Reformation of Shakespeare”
Samuel Fallon: Departmental Prize for the Best Essay Accepted for Publication for “Astrophil, Philisides, and the Coterie in Print,” accepted for publication in English Literary Renaissance
Andrew Kraebel: Departmental Prize for the Best Dissertation of the Year and the Theron Rockwell Field Prize for a poetic, literary, or religious work by any Yale student for “English Traditions of Biblical Criticism and Translation in the Later Middle Ages”
Shu-Han Luo: Noah Webster Prize for “Prosody and Play: Metrical Artistry in the Exeter Book Riddles”
Rebecca Rush: Elizabethan Club Award for criticism on a Renaissance topic for “Jonson’s Innocent Muse: Female Figures and Authorial Control in Early Modern Drama”
Eric Weiskott: Departmental Prize for the Best Essay Accepted for Publication for “Phantom Syllables in the English Alliterative Tradition,” accepted for publication in Modern Philology and Elizabethan Club Award for for criticism on a Renaissance topic for “The Durable Alliterative Tradition”
2012-2013 Prize Winners
Andrew Karas: Departmental Prize for the Best Dissertation of the Year for “Visions of Modern Poetry”
Michael Komorowski: Departmental Prize for Best Dissertation of the Year for “The Arts of Interest: Private Property and the English Literary Imagination in the Age of Milton”
Lukas Moe: Departmental Prize for Excellence in Coursework for “Conspiracy, action, and publicity: Timothy Dwight, Jedidiah Morse, and Charles Brockden Brown”
Tessie Prakas: Elizabethan Club Prize for criticism on a Renaissance topic for “ ‘Thou art a figurative, a metaphorical God too’: John Donne and the Aesthetics of Exegesis”
Rebecca Rush: Elizabethan Club Prize for criticism on a Renaissance topic for “ ‘This sweet Laborinth’: Fabrication in John Davies’ Orchestra”
Glyn Salton-Cox: Departmental Prize for the Best Essay Accepted for Publication for “Literary Praxis Beyond the Melodramas of Commitment: Edward Upward, Soviet Aesthetics, and Leftist Self Fashioning,” Comparative Literature 2013, Vol 65, No 4: 408-428
Eric Weiskott: Noah Webster Prize for work in the history of language for “Two Unremarked Alliterative Poems”
2011-2012 Prize Winners
Anya Adair: Noah Webster Prize for “ ‘Lustum’, ‘Estum’ and ‘Wilgeofa’ in Beowulf: Joy as a Metaphor for Volition in Gift-Exchange”
Carla Baricz: Elizabethan Club Prize for criticism on a Renaissance topic for “Satan Reads Milton: Modes of Romance in Paradise Lost”
Jordan Brower: Departmental Essay Prize for Excellence in Coursework for “Faulkner’s (Critique of) Corporate Authorship”
Christopher Grobe: Departmental Prize for the Best Dissertation of the Year for “Performing Confession: Poetry, Performance, and New Media Since 1959”
Brad Holden: Elizabethan Club Prize for criticism on a Renaissance topic for “Homer and Heterdoxy: The Epic Tradition and Milton’s Heretical Atonement”
Michael Komorowski: Departmental Prize for the Best Essay Accepted for Publication for “Milton’s Natural Law: Divorce and Individual Property”
Ross Macdonald: Prize Teaching Fellowship for 2012-2013
Justin Sider: Departmental Prize for the Best Essay Accepted for Publication for “Framing Tennyson’s Farewells: Authority and Materiality in ‘Morte d’Arthur’ ”
Eric Weiskott: Noah Webster Prize for work in the history of the language for “Emendation Metri Causa in the Gawain-Group”
2010-2011 Prize Winners
Michaela Bronstein: Departmental Prize for the Best Essay Accepted for Publication for “The writer is (not) amoral: Conrad’s Persistence in Faulkner,” published in Essays in Criticism (Oxford), October 2011
Jordan Brower: Departmental Essay Prize for Excellence in Coursework for “The Mill on the Floss, Riparian Law, and the Difficulty of Judgment”
David Currell: Elizabethan Club Prize for criticism on a Renaissance topic for “Matter of Scorn: Milton and Satire”
Erica Levy McAlpine: Albert Stanborough Cook Prize for poetry
John Muse: Departmental Prize for the Best Dissertation of the Year for “Short Attention Span Theaters: Modernist Shorts Since 1880”
Eric Weiskott: Noah Webster Prize for work in the history of the language for “Making Beowulf Scream: Exclamation and the Punctuation of Old English Poetry”
2009-2010 Prize Winners
David Currell: Elizabethan Club Prize for criticism on a Renaissance topic for “Tamburlaine’s Other Children: Anatomies of War and Heroic Mockery in Shakespearean Drama”
Samuel Fallon: James A. Veech Prize for “Milton’s Strange God: Theology and Narrative Form in Paradise Lost,” English Literary History, Vol 79, No 1, Spring 2012
Andrew Kau: Elizabethan Club Prize for criticism on a Renaissance topic for “Boileau and the Fate of the Epic”
Thomas Koenigs: James A. Veech Prize for “The Commonplace Walden: A Speculative Reading of Thoreau”
Sebastian Lecourt: James A. Veech Prize for “Matthew Arnold and Religion’s Cosmopolitan Histories,” published in Victorian Literature and Culture
Erica Miao: Noah Webster Prize for work in the history of the language for “ ‘A color’d man an’t got a tongue like oder folk’: Contexts for African-American Dialect Speech in Cooper’s The Spy”
Eric Weiskott: Noah Webster Prize for work in the history of the language for “ ‘Ancestral plains’: spatial poetics in Rigspula and the Old English Rune Poem”
2008-2009 Prize Winners
Samuel Cross: James A. Veech Prize for “The Ethics of Tact in The Wings of the Dove,” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 2010, Vol 43, No 3: 401-423
Irina Dumitrescu: James A. Veech Prize for the best dissertation in 2008-2009 for “The Instructional Moment in Anglo-Saxon Literature”
Thomas Koenigs: James A. Veech Prize for “Whatever May Be the Merit of My Book as a Fiction: Instructional Fictionality in Weiland”
Michael Komorowski: Elizabethan Club Prize for criticism on a Renaissance topic for “Politic History, Impolitic Laws: Tacitism and the Common Law Mind in Measure for Measure”
Andrew Kraebel: James A. Veech Prize for “Grammatica and the Authenticity of the Psalms-commentary Attributed to Bruno the Carthusian,” published in Medieval Studies
Ben LaBreche: James A. Veech Prize (honorable mention) for “Espousing Liberty: The Gender of Liberalism and the Politics of Miltonic Divorce,” forthcoming in English Literary History
Hilary Menges: Elizabethan Club Prize for criticism on a Renaissance topic for “Monuments, Books, and Readers in Milton’s Early Poetry and Prose”
Erica Miao: Mary Cady Tew prize for literature; the James A. Veech Prize (honorable mention) for “The English Adaptation of Cavalli’s L’Erismena: Opening Moves”; and the Noah Webster Prize for “Sociolinguistic Verisimilitude? Do-support in Shakespeare’s Early Modern English”
Matthew Mutter: James A. Veech Prize for “Wallace Stevens, Analogy, and Tautology: The Problem of a Secular Poetics,” forthcoming in English Literary History
James Redding: James A. Veech Prize (honorable mention) for “Whitman Unbound: Democracy and Poetic Form, 1910-1927,” forthcoming in New Literary History
Glyn Salton-Cox: Mary Cady Tew prize for literature
Jesse Schotter: Noah Webster Prize for “ ‘Verbivocovisuals’: James Joyce and the Problem of Babel”
Sarah Van der Laan: James A. Veech Prize (honorable mention) for the best dissertation in 2008-2009 for “What Virtue and Wisdom Can Do: Homer’s Odyssey in the Renaissance Imagination”
2007-2008 Prize Winners
Michaela Bronstein: James A. Veech Prize for “Mirror of Miraculous Silver: Realism, Romance, and Character in Henry James”
David Currell: Elizabethan Club Prize for criticism on a Renaissance topic for “Counterfactual and Contingency in Paradise Lost”
Annmarie Drury: Noah Webster Prize (honorable mention) for “In Poetry and Translation, Robert Browning’s Case for Innovation”
Irina Dumitrescu: Noah Webster Prize for work in the history of the language for “Bede’s ABC and the Miracle of Language”
David Gorin: James A. Veech Prize for poetry for “Minotaur”
Christopher Grobe: James A. Veech Prize for “The Scenario of the Relic, the Scenario of the Transitory: Tactile Faith and the Status of the Stage Property in the New York Corpus Christ Play”
Michael Komorowski: Elizabethan Club Prize (honorable mention) for criticism on a Renaissance topic for “Private Property and the Nature of Marvell’s Republicanism”
Erica Levy: Academy of American Poets Prize and James A. Veech Prize for poetry for “Stan Reid”
Ross Macdonald: Prize Teaching Fellowship for 2009-2010
Sarah Novacich: Noah Webster Prize for “The Old English Exodus and the Read Sea”
Justin Sider: Gordon Barber Memorial Prize for poetry for “Sebastian van Stork”
Nathan Suhr-Sytsma: Prize Teaching Fellowhip for 2009-2010
William Weber: Noah Webster Prize (honorable mention) for “Translating Poetically: A Note on a Translation of Beowulf” (with translation)