Honors and Awards

Honors

Students in the Department of English who have a strong undergraduate record in the Department and who complete an approved BA Project that is judged to be of the highest quality by the graduate student preceptor, faculty advisor, and Director of Undergraduate Studies graduate with departmental honors. Honors recommendations are made to the Master of the Humanities Collegiate Division by the department and it is the Master of the Humanities Collegiate Division who makes the final decision.

Janel Mueller Undergraduate Thesis Prize

The Janel Mueller Undergraduate Thesis Prize (formerly known as the Napier Wilt Prize) is awarded to the undergraduates in English who complete the finest BA Projects. Nominations are submitted by the Projects' faculty advisor and awarded in the Spring quarter.

2025-2026 recipient:

JESSICA ZANG, "A Long Stretch of Time: A Spatiotemporality of Asian America and the Laboring/Leisuring Body in Activities of Daily Living"
Honorable Mentions:
- BEN MIELE, "An Agonistic Reading of Blood Meridian"
- SHILOH MILLER, "Limitation and Language in Wallce Stevens' 'The Man with the Blue Guitar'"
- VANESSA YELDER, "All Magic Comes with Blood: The Essentializing Rhetoric of the Magic/System in Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn"

2024-2025 recipient:

SAM REMONDI, "But a Long Account of Calamities:' Form Historicity, and Redemption in W.G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn"

2023-2024 recipients:

MANON THEODOLY, "Contentious Bodies and Transgressive Voices: ‘Articulating Spaces’ and Imaginative Resistance in Mahsa Mohebali’s In Case of Emergency and Nasim Marashi’s I’ll Be
Strong for You"
SAMMY ZIMMERMAN, "Haunted Empire: Gothic Japanism in British Literature of the Fin de Siècle"

2022-2023 recipients:

JONATHAN BADONSKY
EMILY CHENG
SIMONE GULLIVER

2021-2022 recipients:

VIVIAN LEI
MADISON THAN
AVIVA WALDMAN

2020-2021 recipients:

NICOLAS PENO
ALEXA PERLMUTTER
RENEE WEHRLE
IMAAN YOUSUF

Dunn Research Prize

Third-year English majors are invited to apply for the Dunn Research Prize. Two or three prizes of around $1,000 will be awarded for the summer before the student's fourth year. The prize is designed to contribute towards living expenses of students as they work on a major piece of writing or research, such as a BA project. Funds must be used in the summer following the winner’s third year in the college. Students who are awarded this prize will be expected to submit a summary (1-2 pages) of their summer work for the donor by the beginning of the third week of Autumn Quarter.

Students should submit a brief proposal that (1) describes the project and (2) outlines a preliminary budget. Students must also include the name of a faculty member who will submit a confidential letter of support to the Student Affairs Assistant. There is no minimum GPA requirement and faculty recommenders may come from outside the English Department. Faculty should submit letters to the Student Affairs Administrator.

Past successful applications have included:

identification of archives, materials, and sites of expertise that the student hopes to engage;
a narrow enough vision that a student can reasonably make significant progress towards their research goals over the summer;
a sense of how the money will be spent with some precision;
how the proposed project either builds from past research interests and/or bulwarks a project the student is about to undertake.

Some examples of past successful proposals can be found here.

2025-2026 recipients:

LEE GUTMAN
MELIA MOORE
TYLER SOOKRALLI

2024-2025 recipients:

MEGAN HA
BEN MIELIE
JOACHIM SCIAMMA