No prizes were awarded for the 2024 competition year.
2023 Winners
- Emily Sharrett, “Prudent Planting: Posthuman Justice in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus” (Ph.D. candidate in English, Loyola University, Chicago) for the paper’s excellent use of scholarly discourse, sophisticated argument, and fascinating examination of the roles of human and non-human actors in an ecosystem that is both social and natural.
- Maggie Heeschen, “Mound Sitting in the Poetic Edda: Memory, Myth, and Landscape” (Ph.D. candidate in English, Univ. of Minnesota) for this paper’s excellent descriptions of mound-sitting as a locus of knowledge. The paper persuasively makes a case for the traditional formulaic usage of the phrase “sitja a haugi” in the Poetic Edda, whose traditional meaning clarifies and expands the significance of specific passages of the Poetic Edda.
- Alicia Haniford’s paper, “An Absent-minded Paragon: Chivalry and Spiritual Cost of Forgetting in Guy of Warwick” (Ph.D. student at University of British Columbia), builds a thought-provoking argument, informed by scholarship on memory and forgetting. Members of the committee commented on the paper’s sophistication, written in a style and with a framework that shows advanced work and thought, and making a strong case for the novelty of its reading of the text.