Dean's Prize Past Recipients
2021
Joseph Lawless, Dean's Prize for Graduate Research. Joseph is a Ph.D. student in American Studies. His award-winning paper is titled, "Queer Men and the Scene of Condomless Sex: Reflections of Ethico-Politics of In(-)Difference and a Queer Psychoanalytics."
Sigi Macias, Dean's Prize for Undergradate Research. Sigi is majoring in History. Sigi's award-winning paper is titled, "Solidarity through Song: Exploitation and Sahred Experience of the Textile Factory Women in the Late Meji Period."
2020
Kelsey Smoot, Dean's Prize for Graduate Research. Kelsey is a Ph.D. student for American Studies. Their award-winning paper was titled, “The Epistemology of Studs—Black, Queer and/or Female Masculinities, Unwritten as the Second Butch."
Samuel McIntyre, Dean's Prize for Undergraduate Research. Samuel is majoring in English. His award-winning paper was titled, "Queer Pregnancy and Queer Children in Woolf’s Fiction."
2019
Michaela Kleber, Dean's Prize for Graduate Research. Michaela is a Ph.D. student in History. Her award-winning paper was titled, “Are You a Man?": French and Illinois First Encounters.”
Katherine Avery, Dean's Prize for Undergraduate Research. Katherine is majoring in English and American Studies. Her award-winning paper is titled, “Atomic Bombshells: Pin-Up Culture, Sexual Armament, and the Production of Womanhood in Cold War America.”
2018
Anne Powell, Dean's Prize for Graduate Research. Anne is a M.A. in History. Her award-winning paper was titled, “Miss Rebecca Story’s Book”: A Portal to a Boundless World."
Sakinaa Rock, Dean's Prize for Undergraduate Research. Sakinaa is majoring in Africana Studies. Her award-winning paper was titled, “Black Women’s Contributions to Pan-African Thought: The Revolutionary Pan-Africanism of Audley ‘Queen Mother’ Moore and Claudia Jones.”
2017
Jan Huebenthal, Dean's Prize for Graduate Research. Jan is a Ph.D. student in American Studies. His award-winning paper was titled, "Irreverence Can't Come from Consensus: Affective Biopolitics and Gender in ACT UP New York.
Marianna Stepniak, Dean's Prize for Undergraduate Research. Marianna is a major in English and GSWS. She was awarded for her webiste, Babcia's Project: Mapping the Reality of World War II and Communist Poland.
2016
Helis Sikk, Dean's Prize for Graduate Research. Helis is a Ph.D. student in American Studies, awarded for her paper titled, "The Art of Activism: Southerners on New Ground and Creative Resistance in the South."
Noah Brooksher, Dean's Prize for Undergraduate Research. Noah is a major in both English and GSWS, awarded for his paper titled, "Only Suitcases: Fluidity and the Freedom of Motion in Ariel."
2015
Amanda Stuckey, Dean's Prize for Graduate Research. Amanda is a Ph.D. student in American Studies. She won for her paper titled, "The Womb of Futurity": Reproducing Creoles in the Early American Seduction Novel."
Annie Fuller, Dean's Prize for Undergraduate Research. Annie won for her paper titled, "Sunrise: A Vashti Midrash."
2014
Kimberly Mann, Dean's Prize for Graduate Research. A Ph.D student in American Studies, Kimberly explores the construction of body and femininity in her chapter, "With the Flexibility of Flesh: Machining the Feminine Cyborg." Her work analyzes Catherine Lucille Moore's 1944 short story "No Woman Born," which tells the story of Deidre, a performer and dancer who is transformed into a mechanical cyborg following a devastating injury in a fire. In the context of Moore's story, Mann deftly explores the relationship between self and body, the perception of women's bodies, and feminine identity. She also demonstrates how Moore's story anticipates major feminist issues, such as gender as performance, thirty years before they were given significant attention by feminist theorists.
Carlton Fleenor, Dean's Prize for Undergraduate Research. Carlton is a major in Literary & Cultural Studies and minor in GSWS. His paper, written for Professor Gul Ozyegin's "Comparative Studies in Gender and Work" course, is titled "Too Many Reasons Why: A Politically Situated Look at Gender, Media, and the Videogame Industry." Carlton argues that the intertwined nature of the video game industry and the media that report on the industry must be considered when analyzing biases women face in the industry. He explores the underlying profit-driven motives that have caused the video game media to devote increased coverage to the issue of women in the industry and goes on to assess women's current role in the industry in view of feminist theory and challenges faced by women in STEM fields.
2013
Faith Barton, Dean's Prize for Undergraduate Research. Faith's paper, "Sex Work as Embodied and Emotional Labor: Female Sex Workers, Performativity, and Transgressing Gendered Sexual Binaries and Boundaries," written for Professor Gul Ozyegin's course GSWS 430: Comparative Studies in Gender and Work, looks at sex work as performative, meaning that the speech acts and bodily comportment of exotic dancers, prostitutes and other sex workers are carefully negotiated, enabling them to carry out the physical and emotional tasks associated with their labor. Such an approach, Faith argues, is necessary if feminist researchers are to treat sex workers "as complete social beings who have agency and negotiate structural inequalities and hierarchies in the context of a workplace that contains the risks of physical danger and psychological costs."
Lindsay Keiter, Dean's prize for Graduate Research. Lindsey is a Ph.D. student in the History Department, who submitted a chapter from her dissertation titled: "'I fear some interference will become necessary to rescue her': Harriet Chew Carroll and Extralegal Response to Marital Breakdown in the Early Republic." Lindsay explores the story of Harriet Chew Carroll, working with the Chew Family Papers at The Historical Society of Pennsylvania, to examine the ways in which families addressed marital difficulties when divorce was an impossibility for one reason or another. In Carroll's case, her husband's alcoholism and emotional abusiveness finally forced her to accept familial assistance in negotiating an informal separation from him. As Lindsay argues, the silence surrounding domestic conflict in early America renders the archive around Carroll's case a remarkable and revealing one.
2012
Katelyn Durkin, Dean's Prize for Undergraduate Research.
Kathryn Synder, Dean's Prize for Graduate Research.
2011
Jennifer Root, Dean's Prize for Undergraduate Research. Jennifer's winning essay, "The Invisible Cage: the Art of Remedios Varo and the Creation of Equality of Gender," was originally submitted to Professor Francie Cate-Arries (Hispanic Studies 493), and Jennifer translated it for us. In the essay, she discusses Spanish-Mexican painter Remedios Varo's use of the metaphor of artisanal crafts as a form of witness to declare publicly the injustice and the oppression of women. The household arts are represented in her paintings as tools of a system predisposed against the equality of gender. Varo shows what she believes to be the solution of this oppression: the erasure of the gender binary.
Alexandra Méav Jerome, Dean's Prize for Graduate Research. A Ph.D. candidate in American Studies, Alexandra's work, 
"Shahrazad in the White City: Gender, Performance, and Muslim Womanhood at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition," comes from a master's thesis supervised by Professor Maureen Fitzgerald.
2010
Teresa Ingraham, Dean's Prize for Undergraduate Research. Teresa's paper, "'It Was Not Too Late': Jeanette Winterson's Use of the Female Body in Producing a New and Uniquely 
Representational Feminist Form," was written for ENGL 465: Postmodern Fiction and Theory, with Professor Christy Burns. Teresa's paper, on Art and Lies by Jeanette Winterson, explores comparisons of the female body to parchment, canvases, maps and books — all of which intimately tie feminine methods of representation to unique expressions of desire, sexuality, and creational power. Teresa argues that Winterson parallels the female body to a text or canvas to emphasize the masculinity of representational history and to call for a reclamation of female expressive power. Her conflation of language and body and the relocation of creative agency to the female's sex successfully "genders" a new representational form and excludes masculine participation in the "meaning-making" process.
Laurel Daen, Dean's Prize for Graduate Research. Laurel's paper, "Martha Ann Honeywell and the Art of Self-Presentation in America's Early Republic," was written for HIST 715: American History to 1815, with Professor Brett Rushforth. Laurel's essay examines the early nineteenth-century itinerant artist Martha Ann Honeywell, who traveled throughout America and Europe exhibiting her cut-and-paste silhouettes, embroidery, waxwork, and miniature writing samples. Interestingly, Honeywell also had a disability and was born without hands and with just three toes on one foot. Exploring the intersections of gender and dis/ability, Laurel argues that Honeywell used her artwork to selectively challenge and conform to social prescriptions in order to advance her career.
2009
Casey Metheny, Dean's Prize for Undergraduate Research. Casey is an English and Psychology major. Her essay on "Revolutionary Virginity" in Virginia Woolf adroitly explains how Woolf's virginal women can be read as icons of embodied independence and creativity — though not without a burdensome psychic cost —rather than as figures of self-denial and patriarchal purity. We particularly appreciated how Casey drew upon cultural and medical history as well as the literary contexts for Woolf's achievements.
Margaret Freeman, Dean's Prize for Graduate Research. A Ph.D student in American Studies, Casey's article on sororities in the postwar American South locates these institutions as contested ground, where ideals of elite femininity become stressed by competing claims of tradition and modernity, tasteful formality, and civic engagement, especially in the context of Cold War patriotism. Margaret's skillful use of archival sources merits special attention; the sorority documents she discusses were truly eye-opening.
2008
Caroline Carpenter Nichols, Dean's Prize for Graduate Research. A Ph.D. candidate in American Studies, Caroline won for a revised chapter from her dissertation, called "The 'Adventuress' Becomes a 'Lady': Ida B. Wells' British Tours." The chapter describes the effects on Wells' anti-lynching campaign of the lecture tours she took through England and Scotland in 1893. Drawing on Wells' own autobiography and diaries, Caroline argues that the tours and the new outbreak of "spectacle lynching" in the American South "spurred Wells to re-conceptualize her campaign," to "assume new leadership roles," and to become more aggressive, even more masculine, in her self-presentation.
Morgan Berman, Dean's Prize for Undergraduate Research. Morgan won for her paper (based on her GSWS Honors thesis) "Beyond Pro Versus Anti: A Transnational Feminist Critique of Cross-Cultural Comparisons of Female Genital Cutting." Morgan identifies a deadlock in feminist accounts of FGC, showing how the debate has been reduced to two, opposing positions: "either support local communities to practice FGC as they see fit or reject FGC as an intolerable practice." In her paper, she argues that "Western feminist scholarship needs to take responsibility for its own biases and then confront them in order to support the work of local activist groups who are personally involved in the process of change enacted by activists working in these communities."
2007
Patricia Nelson, Dean's Prize for Undergraduate Research. Her paper was titled, "Representative Destruction of the Female Body: Social Critique in So Far From God and The Rag Doll Plagues."
2006
Beth Block, Dean's Prize for Undergraduate Research. Her paper was titled, "Ancilla, Virga, Matrona, and Augusta on Screen: The Depiction of Roman Women in Hollywood Cinema," and Mary Teeter, who wrote "Re-humanizing Rochester: Masculinity Studies and Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre."
Elizabeth Neidenbach, Dean's Prize for Graduate Research. Her paper was titled "The Power of a Legend: Negotiations and Representations of Marie Laveau in Francine Prose's Marie Laveau, Ishmael Reed's The Last Days of Lousiana Red, and Jewell Parker Rhodes' Voodoo Dreams."
2005
Kristen Proehl, Dean's Prize for Graduate Research. Her paper was titled, "Re-Evaluating Sentimental Violence in Uncle Tom's Cabin and Dred."
Caitlin Freeman, Dean's Prize for Undergraduate Research. She won for her Monroe Project, "Sex and the Street: Adolescent Girls and the Sex Culture of Deerfield, MA, 1730-1755."
