Spring 2020 will undoubtedly be remembered as the strangest semester of our lifetimes—the rapid swerve from what should have been a blissful spring break with the promise of warmth and daffodils, to a tightly imposed shutdown that cut us off from each other and forced us to congregate in little boxes on Zoom. But through the fear, the crises, the strange stilling of time, and the disconnections of online teaching, we have been moved and inspired by our students who continued to show up for classes even while dispersed in time zones across the world, still read and engaged and thought and wrote – and whose passion for literary study energized faculty who chafed behind computer screens. It therefore with especial delight that I want to salute and celebrate our graduating seniors and prize winners this year. It is no mean achievement to complete a senior essay even in the best of times: to have done so while hunkered down without access to libraries and friends deserves particular commendation. Our prize winners this year undertook a wide range of projects, both critical studies and translations, and we celebrate their success.
CONGRATULATIONS TO OUR CLASS
OF 2020!!!
Andrea de Oliveira
Nico de Ruiter
Claire Elliman
Theodore Elliman
Hannah Kwak
Anne Lu
Filip Sestan
James Wedgwood
Karen Yao
CONGRATULATIONS TO OUR 2020 PRIZE WINNERS!!
THE ALVIN B. KERNAN PRIZE IN LITERATURE
James Wedgwood
“Expressible Bliss: Using Schopenhauer’s Aesthetics to Read
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction”
HONORABLE MENTION
Hannah Kwak
“Representations of Writing in Colonial-Period Korean
Literature: Making Legible a Paradox of Empire”
THE BIANCAMARIA FINZI-CONTINI CALABRESI PRIZE
IN COMPARATIVE LITERATURE
Anne Lu
“Singing for Herself: Women and Poetic Tradition in
Louise Labé and Liu Rushi”
Filip Sestan
“Mass Spectatorship and the Aesthetics of Production in Soviet
Non-Fiction Cinema 1925-1932”
THE RICHARD MAXWELL PRIZE FOR TRANSLATION AND
TRANSLATION STUDIES
Bailey Owen
Translated selection from Créature by Rene Belletto
Daniel Yadin
Translation of selected poems by Tuvia Ruebner
HONORABLE MENTION
Griffin Berlin
Translated selection from Alger, le crí by Samir Toumi
