COM Senior Thesis Prize Awardees

2021

Sana Khan, Arab Origins, Persianate Begginnings: Mapping the Spatial Wandering of Majnūn Laylā

Rosamond van Wingerden, Rimsky-Korsakov the Bard: Sadko from Belina to Opera 

2020

Nicholas Judt, The Sea! The Sea! Truths and Truth in Cheikh Hamidou Kane’s L’Aventure Ambiguë

Emily Spalding, Consider the Footnote1 : An Exploration of the Footnote in Russian and American Postmodern Fiction2

2019

Taylor Yoonji Kang, “All Men by Their Very Nature Reach Out To Know”: Towards an interpretation of hands in Renaissance and Baroque artistic culture

John William Hoffmeyer, Toward a Poetics of Building: An Essay on the Dialectics of Form in Romantic Poetry and Song

2018

Magdalena Clare Duncan Collum, Omnis Celestis Symphonia: Conceptions of Harmony in the Thought and Music of St. Hildegard of Bingen

Logan Mackenzie Ruth Sander, Toward a Critical Pluralism: Godot's Journey in the People's Republic of China

2017

Tess A. Bissell, Princeton Inside/Out: Lessons from the Prison Classroom

Lara M. Norgaard (Honorable Mention), States of Discourse, Traces of Crime: Detective Fiction and the Social Construction of Memory in Post-Dictatorship Brazil and Argentina  

Whitney Sha (Honorable Mention), How to do Things with Names

2016

Helena Elisabeth Ord, Reading the Nibelungen Women: Signs of their Times in the Thirteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

2015

Helen Greene, From Layla to Shab and Noche: The Literary Influence of The Thousand and One Nights in Spain and Persia

2014

Jessica Christine Blake, Diary Afterlives: Representation, Misrepresentation, and Manipulation in the Diaries of Thomas Turner, Virginia Woolf, and Les Frères Goncourt

Christina Eugenia Perruccio (Honorable Mention), The Pleasure in Power: A Socio-linguistic and Musical Study of Rap Music in the United States and France

Nellie May Pickett Peyton (Honorable Mention), Translating Translation: A New Approach to the Bilingual Postcolonial Text

2013

Leana Hirschfeld-Kroen, In Pursuit of the Child at Play: A Dynamic and Dangerous Myth of Modern Life

Emma Watt (Honorable Mention), Hybrid Texts and the Great Globe Itself: Shakespearean Afterlives in Modern Latin America

2012

Francesca Furchtgott, "In the Beginning, All the World Was America:" Musical Theater and the Shaping of American Identity

Alana Tornello, To Dream the Impossible Regime: Utopia from Page to Public Square in the Italian Risorgimento, the Russian Revolution, and the Egyptian Arab Spring

Nicholas Hybel (Honorable Mention), Political Beauty: Aesthetic Political Theory in Machiavelli, Nietzsche, and Heart of Darkness

2011

Michelle Joseph, Reading the Poe-tic "Art" of Murder and Drawing Geometric Conclusions in Walsh’s Variaciones en Rojo

Ting Bok (Honorable Mention), The Self Reflective Actor: Literal and Figurative Mirrors in and between Eileen Chang’s Se, Jie and Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution

Devin Blair Kennedy (Honorable Mention) Contested Body: Identity, Anatomy, Sign

2010

Alexandra Jayne Dantzlerward, Georg Lukács on the Nineteenth-Century Russian Novel: A Logical Amendment

Paavana Lakshmi Kumar, Musical Alchemy, Temporal Analogy: The Hidden Compositional Models ofThe Magic Mountain and Doctor Faustus

Anthony Audi (Honorable Mention), William Blake’s Heaven and Hell in the American West: A Study of Dead Man’s Promiscuous Referentiality

Zachary Michael Wieder (Honorable Mention), In the Shadow of Words: Three Modes of Literary Translation and the Bilingual Writer

Robert and Lynne Fagles Senior Thesis Prize Awardees

2021

Nancy Kim, The Turtleship & Other Stories

2020

Somi Jun, Filmic Poetry and Poetic Video:  Seeking Home Through Experiments with Ekphrasis in Pinpoint Skin

2019

Helena Van Brande, Let Us Calmly Be Grass: Environmental Poems by European Women

Anna Zabel (Honorable Mention), Through the Eyes of the Victim:  Depicting Women’s Trauma in Expressionist Theater

Nathan Phan (Honorable Mention), “What Type of Asian Are You?” – Exploring the Asian American Experience Through a Deconstruction of Stereotypes in Type A

2018

Alexandra Kiri Mendelsohn, Rylie Street

2017

Emma C. Michalak, In the Garden

2016

Andra Lee Bailard, I Seek a Dark and Quiet Stanza: Translation of Scapigliatura Poetry

Zoë Catherine Perot, The Black light: A Translation of Het zwarte licht by Harry Mulisch

2015

Maeli Goren, The Story of Mamãe: An Original Play for Young Audiences Inspired by José de Alencar’s Iracema

Yessica Martinez, A Tale of Conquering

Amanda Devine (Honorable Mention), The Blooming Sequence - Contemporary German Lyric Poets in Translation: Marcel Beyer, Mirko Bonne, and Hendrik Jackson Translation and Critical Remarks

2014

Patience Elizabeth Haggin, The Moonstone: Scenes from the Countryside.  A Translation and Study

William Turner Howard, Perpendicular Lives by Álvaro Enrigue with a Critical Afterword by the Translator

2013

Lily Akerman, Something Rich and Strange: The Tempest with Humans and Marionettes

Ben Barron (Honorable Mention), Silsie: A Theatrical Adaptation in English and French of the Novel Silsie by Marie Redonnet

2012

M. Derek Gideon, Strange Land: Poems

2011

Maria Luzarraga, Due Unto Others: A Play and Critical Afterword

Molly Silberberg, Moving Between the Lines: Directing the Ensemble in Caryl Churchill’s The Striker

2010

Laura Parker Fletcher, After by Annie Saumont: A Translation

Anna Catherine Sheaffer, The Moth Collector: Short Stories

Comparative Literature Junior Paper Prize

Meigan Clark (2021)

Revenge or Reconciliation: How Female Figures Resist the Violence of Patriarchal Contract-Making through Hybridity, Language, and Genre in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter and Euripides' Medea

Madeline Matthews (2021)

Seductresses, Schemers, Sovereigns:
Handel’s Satirical Characterizations of Cleopatra and Agrippina

Katherine Matthias (2020)

DREAMING IN DISLOCATION

Border Transgressions in Yoko Tawada’s Memoirs of a Polar Bear (雪の練習生)

Annalena Wolcke (2019)

The “Translation” of the MeToo Movement in Germany

Rosamond van Wingerden (2018)

Sappho’s Reproach of Helen: Emending a Lacuna to Understand Sappho Fragment 16

Caroline Stafford (2017)

‘Socrate est un chat’: Towards a Feminist Interpretation of Zoomorphy and Alteriority in Eugène Ionesco’s Rhinocéros

Joseph Gauvreau (2016)

Verse as Lyrics – Setting Poetry to Music in Renaissance France

John Colon (2015)

Bolaño’s Cognitive Mapping: Charting Globalized Space in 2066

Konstantinos Koutras (2015)

Postmodern Notions of the Author: The Case of Fan-fiction

Emily Tu (2015) Honorable Mention

Past, Present, and Future Images of Asian American Identity in the Contemporary

Asian American Graphic Narrative

Darya Koltunyuk (2014)

Reading through Music and Dance: Turgenev, Chopin, and A Month in the Country

Joel Newberger (2013)

The Manuscript History of Charles Olson’s “Letter 27”

Audrey Hall (2012)

A Tattered Copy of Eternity: Theories of Time in Borges’ Fiction

Emma Austenfeld (2011)

The Incompatibility of Masculinity and Love

John Hoffmeyer (2019)

Hana Lethen (2017)

Lara Norgaard (2017)

Amanda Devine (2015)

Victoria Su (2015)

Lily Akerman (2012)

Audrey Hall (2012)

Claudia Young-Joo Park (2012)