Humanities Research Prizes

  1. About
  2. History
  3. Research Prizes
  4. Humanities Research Prizes

HRI Prizes for Research in the Humanities allow us to celebrate excellence in humanities scholarship.

These prizes recognize outstanding humanities research at the University of Illinois, with awards given at the undergraduate, graduate, and faculty levels in all sectors of the university with focus on the humanities and humanities-inflected research.

Learn more about HRI Prizes for Research in the Humanities.

2022-2023

Faculty Prizes

Winner

  • John Levi Barnard (Comparative and World Literature), “Colonization to Climate Change: American Literature and a Planet on Fire,” in Oxford Handbook of Twentieth-Century American Literature. Leslie Bow and Russ Castronovo, eds. (Oxford UP, 2022): 40–58.

Honorable Mention

  • Julie Gaillard (French and Italian), “‘Returning 'home’? Or Dwelling in the Pixel Age: On Invader’s Intermedial Invasion,” in Returning (Nostalgia)/Retourner (la nostalgie), Intermédialités/Intermediality, André Habib, Suzanne Paquet, Carl Therrien (eds.), n°39 (Spring 2022): 1–24.

Graduate Prizes

Co-Winners

  • Alana Ackerman (Anthropology), “‘I Hope They Don’t Find Me Here”: Persecution, Encuentros, and Refuge Across Borders in the Global South,” submitted for ANTH 599: Thesis Research, directed by Professors Andrew Orta and Gilberto Rosas.
  • Christopher Thomas Goodwin (History), “What Difference Does a (Disabled) Husband Make: Disabled Veterans, Women, and the Limits of Population Policy in the Third Reich,” submitted for HIST 599: Thesis Research, directed by Professor Peter Fritzsche.

Undergraduate Prizes

Winner

  • Laura Garcia (Anthropology), “Climate of Fear Among Mexican Journalism,” submitted for ANTH 498: Senior Capstone Seminar, taught by Professors Cris Hughes and Jessica Greenberg.

Honorable Mention

  • Jaylon Muchison (Theatre: Acting), “We Tell Stories: The Influence of Yoruba Performance in Contemporary Theatre,” nominated by Professor Kristen Pullen and submitted for THEA 304: Global Theatre, taught by Professor Pullen.

2021-2022

Faculty Prizes

  • Elizabeth Massa Hoiem (Information Sciences), “The Progress of Sugar: Consumption as Complicity in Children’s Books about Slavery and Manufacturing, 1790-2015.” Children's Literature in Education. 52.2 (June 2021): 162-182.

Honorable Mention

  • Makoto Harris Takao (Music), “Beyond Nostalgia and the Prison of English: Positioning Japan in a Global History of Emotions,” Zeithistorische Forschungen | Studies in Contemporary History. 18.1 (2021).

Graduate Prizes

  • Ana Lisa Eberline (Communication), “Working on the Farm: An Autoethnography Exploring Gender, Race, and Labor Divisions,” submitted for LLS 596/ANTH 515A: Critical Border Studies. Taught by Professor Gilberto Rosas.
     
  • Tiffany Octavia Harris (Education, Policy, Organization and Leadership/Gender and Women’s Studies), “What Counts as Data: A Methodology of Documenting Lived Experiences and Theorizing Archives,” submitted for EPOL 599: Thesis Research, directed by Professor Ruth Nicole Brown.

Honorable Mention

  • Megan Cole (English), “Creating an Asexual Public Sphere: Mary Astell and the Legacy of Medieval English Nuns,” submitted for ENGL 599: Thesis Research, directed by Professor Hina Nazar.

2020-2021

Faculty Prizes

  • Krystal Smalls (Anthropology & Linguistics), “Race, Signs, and the Body: Toward a Theory of Racial Semiotics,” Chapter 12 in The Oxford Handbook of Language and Race (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020). Nominated by Jenny Davis.

Honorable Mentions

  • John Levi Barnard (Comparative and World Literature), “The Bison and the Cow: Food, Empire, Extinction” American Quarterly 72:2 (June 2020).
     
  • David Sepkoski (History), “Extinction in the Anthropocene,” excerpted from Catastrophic Thinking: Extinction and the Value of Diversity from Darwin to the Anthropocene (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020).

Graduate Student Prizes

  • Laura Coby (English), “The Specter in Drag: The Afterlives of Ross Laycock,” submitted for Soc 596/GWS 590: Gender, Race, Sexuality, taught by Professor Ghassan Moussawi.

Honorable Mentions

  • Rhiannon Hein (History), “Agents of Empire? Alexander von Humboldt’s South America and the Global Enlightenment,” nominated by Professor Maria Todorova and submitted for HIST 502: Microhistory, taught by Professor Todorova.
     
  • Po-Chia Tseng (Sociology), “Subordinated Agency: Negotiating the biomedicalization of masculinity among gay men living with HIV,” nominated by Professor Zsuzsa Gille and submitted for SOC 599: Thesis Research, directed by Professor Gille.

2019-2020

Faculty Prizes

  • François Proulx (French and Italian)
    “Bourget, the Chambige Affair, and the Queer Seductions of the Novel,” from Victims of the Book: Reading and Masculinity in Fin-de-Siècle France (University of Toronto Press, 2019)

Honorable Mention

  • Eduardo Ledesma (Spanish and Portuguese)
    “Staging the Spanish Civil War: History and Re-enactment in Joris Ivens’ The Spanish Earth (1937),” Bulletin of Spanish Visual Studies (Nov 2019)

Graduate Student Prizes

  • Megan Gargiulo (Spanish and Portuguese)
    “Debility and Domination in Recogimientos de mujeres in Late Colonial Mexico,” Nominated by Professor Mariselle Meléndez and written for SPAN 599: Thesis Research, directed by Professor Meléndez.

Honorable Mention

  • Ji Hyea Hwang (Comparative and World Literature)
    “Domesticity in the Trilogies of Sean O’Casey and Yu Ch’i-jin,” nominated by Professor Robert Tierney and submitted for CWL 599: Thesis Research, directed by Professor Tierney.

Undergraduate Student Prize

  • Emma Olson
    “Margery Kempe as Mankind: The Influence of East Anglian Drama on The Book of Margery Kempe,” nominated by Professor Carol Symes and submitted for HIST 490: Honors Independent Study, directed by Professor Symes.

2018-19

Faculty Prizes

  • A. Naomi Paik (Asian American Studies)
    “Between Rights and Rightlessness: Haitian Migrants and the Elusive Promises of Humanitarianism,” emisférica 14, no. 1 (2018).

Honorable Mention 

  • Lindsay Rose Russell (English)
    “Toward a Feminist Historiography of Lexicography,” Dictionaries: Journal of the Dictionary Societyof North America. 39, no. 1 (2018): 167-183.
  • Renée Trilling (English)
    “Health and Healing in the Anglo-Saxon World,” Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History. Third series v. 13 (2016) [Published Dec. 2018].

Graduate Student Prizes

  • Marcelo Boccato Kuyumjian (Music)
    “Samba is Black: Making Race in a ‘Raceless’ Genre.” Nominated by Professor Gabriel Solis and written for MUS 576: Doctoral Projects, directed by Professor Solis.

Honorable Mention

  • Yue Liao (Anthropology)
    “Creating Non-polluted Vegetable Baskets: Pesticide Governmentality and the Politics of Security in China’s Risky Society,” nominatedby Professor Jeffrey T. Martin and submitted for ANTH 499: The Anthropology of Policing, taught by Professor Martin.

Undergraduate Student Prizes

  • Emma Levine
    “The Horror of It All: The Upsetting of Anthropocentric Ideals in New Horror,”nominated by Professor Trish Loughran and submitted for ENGL 391: Honors Individual Study, directed by Professor Loughran.

Honorable Mention

  • Brittany Lundberg
    “Awakening Fromthe Dream: Satire, Science Fiction, and Dystopias,” nominated by Professor Anthony Pollock and submitted for ENGL 390: Advanced Individual Study, directed by Professor Pollock.

2017-18

Faculty Prizes

  • Jamie Jones (English)
    “Fish out of Water: The ‘Prince of Whales’ Sideshow and the Environmental Humanities.” Configurations 25, no. 2 (Spring 2017): 189–214.

Honorable Mentions

  • Christopher Freeburg (English)
    “Past the Chokecherry Tree,” selection from Chapter Four of Black Aesthetics. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2017.
  • Ghassan Moussawi (Sociology)
    “Queer Exceptionalism and Exclusion: Cosmopolitanism and Inequalities in ‘Gay Friendly’ Beirut.” The Sociological Review (Sage Publications) 66, no. 1 (2018): 174–190.

Graduate Student Prizes

  • Emily DiFilippo (Spanish and Portuguese)
    “Post-Op in the Real World: Cancer and Queer Resistance in Isabel Franc and Susanna Martín’s Alicia en un mundo real (2011).” Nominated by Professor L. Elena Delgado, and submitted for SPAN 599: Thesis Preparation, directed by Professor L. Elena Delgado.
  • Shelby Strong (East Asian Languages and Cultures)
    “Should We Pass on ‘Passing Women’?: The Stakes of (Trans)gender Ontologies for Korean Namjangyeoja Dramas,” nominated by Professor Toby Beauchamp. Submitted for GWS 470: Transgender Studies, taught by Professor Toby Beauchamp.

2016-17

Faculty Prizes

  • José B. Capino (English)
    “Figures of Empire: Documentaries in the Philippines” in The Colonial Documentary Film in South and South-East Asia. Ed., Ian Aitken and Camille Deprez (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, Dec. 2016): 79-104.
  • Craig Koslofsky (History)
    “Parisian Cafés in European Perspective: Contexts of Consumption, 1660‐1730,” in French History 31,1 (2017): 39-62.

Honorable Mention

  • Alistair Black (Information Sciences)
    “The Long Journey to Libraries of Light,” an extract from “Libraries of Light: British Public Library Design in the Long 1960s.” (London: Routledge, 2017).

Graduate Student Prizes

  • Christine Hedlin (English)
    "Ethiopiansim and the Turn-of-the-Century African American Novel,” submitted for ENG 599: Thesis Preparation, supervised by Professor Justine Murison

Honorable Mention

  • Lisa Ortiz (EPOL)
    “#yonomequito: Deconstructing classed and neoliberal values haunting a Puerto Rican campaign,” written for ANTH 466: Class Culture, and Society, taught by Professor Faye Harrison.

Undergraduate Student Prizes

  • Madeline Decker (English Major)
    “What’s Love Got to Do with It: Intersections of the Personal and Political in The Bostonians and Obergefell v. Hodges,” Nominated by Professor Justine Murison, and written for ENG 300: “Inventing Privacy in 19th-Century America,” taught by Professor Murison (English).
  • Kuizhi (Lewis) Wang (Philosophy)
    “Role of Teleology in Kant’s Philosophy of History,” nominated by Professor Alexandra Newton and written for PHIL 501: “Seminar in the History of Philosophy,” taught by Professor Newton (Philosophy).

2015-16

Faculty Prizes

  • Eduardo Ledesma (Spanish and Portuguese)
    “The Poetics and Politics of Computer Code in Latin America: Codework, Code Art, and Live Coding,” published in Revista de Estudios Hispánicos 49.1 (March 2015).
  • Andrew Gaedtke (English)
    “Neuromodernism: Diagnosis and Disability in Will Self's Umbrella,” published in Modern Fiction Studies 61.2 (Summer 2015): 271-294.

Honorable Mention

  • Michael Silvers (Music: Musicology)
    “Birdsong and a Song About a Bird: Popular Music and the Mediation of Traditional Ecological Knowledge in Northeastern Brazil,” published in Ethnomusicology 59.3 (Fall 2015): 380-397.

Graduate Student Prizes

  • Elizabeth Tavares (English)
    “A Race to the Roof: Cosmetics and Contemporary Histories in the Elizabethan Playhouse, 1592–1596,” forthcoming in Shakespeare Bulletin 34.2 (Summer 2016) and written for English 599: Thesis Research, directed by Professor Curtis Perry.

Honorable Mention

  • Ethan Madarieta (Comparative and World Literature)
    “Unbordering the Body: Raúl Zurita’s Utopian Performance Under Dictatorship,” written for Spanish 590/ Comparative and World Literature 581: Borders, taught by Professor Eric Calderwood. Nominated by Professor Brett Kaplan.

Undergraduate Student Prizes

  • Patricia J. Fleming (English major)
    “The Gods in Men and the Sinners in Women,”nominated by Mara Wade, prepared for German 199: Emblematica Oniline, taught by Professor Mara Wade. Nominated by Professor Wade.

2014-15

Faculty Prizes

  • Amanda Ciafone (Media and Cinema Studies)
    “The Magical Neoliberalism of Network Films,” published in International Journal of Communication V. 8 2014.

Honorable Mention

  • Andrew Gaedtke (English)
    “Halluci-nation: Mental Illness, Modernity, and Metaphor in Midnight’s Children,” published in Contemporary Literature, 55.4 (2014): 701-725.

Graduate Student Prizes

  • Utathya Chattopadhyaya (History)
    “E.P. Thompson, C.L.R. James, and the Afterlives of Internationalism,” written for History 597, directed by Professor Antoinette Burton in Summer 2014. Nominated by Professor Burton.

Honorable Mention

  • Michael King (Landscape Architecture)
    “‘Papering, Paving, and Pulping—Pulverizing Through Resource Extraction” written for English 547: American Colonialism and Its Aftermath, taught by Professor Trish Loughran in Spring 2014. Nominated by Professor Loughran.

Undergraduate Student Prizes

  • Nicholas Millman (English)
    “Fiction in the Guise of a ‘History of Fact’: Reading Gender and Genre in Robinson Crusoe,” written for English 429: “Eighteenth-Century Fiction,” taught by Professor Anthony Pollock.

Honorable Mention

  • Alexandra Swanson (English)
    “The Problematic Paradigm of the Public Sphere: Early and Mid-Eighteenth Century Literary Representations of Coffeehouse Culture,” written for English 206: “Enlightenment Literature and Culture,” taught by In Hye Ha.

2013-14

Faculty Prizes

  • Christopher Freeburg (English)
    “James Baldwin and the Unhistoric Life of Race,” published in South Atlantic Quarterly 112.2 (Spring 2013): 221-239.

Honorable Mention 

  • Thérèse Tierney (Architecture)
    “Reappropriating Social Media: Internet Activism, Counterpublics & Implications,” published in Tierney, The Public Space of Social Media: Connected Cultures of the Network Society. New York: Routledge, 2013.

Graduate Student Prizes

  • Sarah West (Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese)
    “A Neoliberal Love Spell, Race, Tourism and the Yucatan Penninsula, An Analysis of Televisa’s Sortilegio,” published in Cameron McCarthy, et al., eds., Mobilized Identities: Mediated Subjectivity and Cultural Crisis in the Neoliberal Era. Champaign: Common Ground Publishing, 2013. Nominated by Professor Eduardo Ledesma (SIP).

Honorable Mention

  • Christine Hedlin (English)
    “‘Was There Not Reason to Doubt?’: Wieland and Its Secular Age,” written for English 547: Early U.S. Fiction and Secularism, taught by Professor Justine Murison in fall 2013.

Undergraduate Student Prizes

  • Hana Nasser (Political Science)
    “Forming a Collective Movement against the Forced Application of Female Genital Circumcision and Intersex Genital Cutting,”written for Political Science 413: Sex, Power and Politics, taught by Professor Frost in fall 2013.

Honorable Mention

  • Mary Baker (English)
    “The Maintenance of the Mainstream: Policing Difference in Mad Men,”written for English 461: American Narratives of Passing, taught by Professor Siobhan Somerville in spring 2013. Nominated by Professor Somerville.

2012-13

Faculty Prizes

  • Andrew Gaedtke (English)
    “Cognitive Investigations: The Problems of Qualia and Style in the Contemporary Neuronovel,” published in NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, 45.2 (Duke University Press, 2012).
  • Robert Morrissey (History)
    “Kaskaskia Social Network: Kinship and Assimilation in the French-Illinois Borderlands, 1695-1735,” published in The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Serial, 70, number 1, January 2013.

Honorable Mention

  • Michael Rothberg (English)
    “Progress, Progression, Procession: William Kentridge and the Narratology of Transitional Justice,” published in Narrative20.1 (January 2012): 1-24.

Graduate Student Prizes 

  • Kathryn Walkiewicz (English)
    “Running the Land,” written for English 599: Dissertation Research and Writing in Fall 2012, under the direction of Trish Loughran.

Honorable Mentions

  • Benjamin Bascom (English)
    “Imperial Balloons and Museum Empires: The Last American and the Politics of Culture,” written for English 599: Dissertation Research and Writing in Fall 2012, under the direction of Trish Loughran.
  • T.J. Tallie (History)
    “White Liquor: Settler Colonialism and the Racial Politics of Alcohol in Colonial Natal, 1856-1897,” written for History 599: Dissertation Research and Writing in Fall 2012, under the direction of Antoinette Burton.

2011-12

Faculty Prizes

  • Yasemin Yildiz (Germanic Languages and Literatures)
    “Governing European Subjects: Tolerance and Guilt in the Discourse of ‘Muslim Women,’” published Cultural Critique 77.1 (2011): 70-101.

Honorable Mentions

  • Susan Koshy (English / Asian American Studies)
    “Minority Cosmopolitanism,” published in PMLA 126.3 (2011): 592-609.
  • Alma Gottlieb (Anthropology) and Philip Graham (English)
    “Mad to be Modern,” published in Resident Aliens: Learning to Live Cross-Culturally. Ed. Sarah Davis and Melvin Konner. (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2011).

Graduate Student Prizes

  • Derek Attig (History)
    “’A Place Dedicated to Quiet’: The End of Library Segregation and the Ordering of Public Space,” written for History 599: Diss Research and Writing in Fall 2011

Honorable Mentions

  • Ben Bascom (English)
    “Loneliness, Longing, and the Queer Shape of Empire," written for English 547: The Psychic Life of Empire in Fall 2011
  • Pei-lin Wu (Comparative and World Literature)
    “Aesop’s Fables in Ancient China," written for CWL 599 Thesis Research in Fall 2011

Undergraduate Student Prize

  • Tara McGovern (Anthropology)
    “Children of the Revolution: Youth Organization and Political Consciousness in Post War Northern Morazán, El Salvador,” written for LAST 170: Introduction to Latin American and Caribbean Studies in Fall 2011

2010-11

Faculty Prizes

  • Jay Rosenstein, Journalism
    The Lord is Not on Trial Here Today, the Emmy and Peabody Award-winning documentary that was broadcast on national PBS in May.

Honorable Mentions

  • Gabriel Solis, Music
    “I Did it My Way/: Rock and the Logic of Covers,” published in Popular Music and Society 33/3 (July 2010): 297-318
  • L. Elena Delgado, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese
    “The Sound and the Red Fury: The Sticking Points of Spanish Nationalism,” published in the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 11.3 (2010), 263-276.

Graduate Student Prizes

  • Daniel Brant, French
    “Images of Empire: Colonial Cartographic Cinema in Interwar France,” written for CINE 503: Historiography of Cinema in fall 2010.

Honorable Mention

  • Jeremy Wear, English
    “The Semiotics of Discovery: Displaced ‘Truth’ in the Travel Narratives of William Dampier,” written for ENG 592: Research in Special Topics in fall 2010.

2010-11

Faculty Prize

  • Leslie Reagan, History
    "Rashes, Rights, and Wrongs in the Hospital and in the Courtroom: German Measles, Abortion, and Malpractice before Roe and Doe"

Graduate Student Prize

  • Tyler Carrington, History
    "Private Matters in the Public Sphere: the value of Classified Ads as a record of intimate interaction in Eighteenth-Century England"

Undergraduate Student Prize

  • Michael Gastiger, English
    "Monstrosity and Bare Life: The Legal Status of Beowulf's Outcasts"