Dorothy Berkson Award Archive

Congratulations to the past recipients of the Dorothy Berkson Writing Award in Gender Studies.

2023-24 Recipients:

Lauren Caldwell ’24 (English)
“A Shroud Enveloped Her Form”: Incest, the Language of Family, and the Legibility of Power In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (essay)

McKenna Jones ’24 (English)
“Snakes’ Blood: Reclaiming the Dualistic View of the Archaic Medusa” (essay)

2022-23 Recipients:

Venus Edlin ’23 (Rhetoric and Media Studies)
“Lil Nas X and Dolly Parton: Genre Subversion as Queer Practice” (essay)

Jillian Jackson ’23 (English)
“Can the Master’s Linguistics Dismantle the Master’s House?:
Zilia’s Subversive Bilingualism in Letters of a Peruvian Woman” (essay)

2021-22 Recipients:

Eve March ’22 (Art History)
“Maggots and Metamorphosis: ‘Becoming’ in Louise Bourgeois’ Self Portraiture” (essay)

Ashley O’Leary ’22 (English)
“‘Penetrating Nature’s Hiding Places’: Masculinist Scientific Ideals, Fatal Passions, and the Female Body in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein” (essay)

2020–2021 Recipients:

Phoenix Bruner ’21 (English, Gender Studies minor)
The Persistence and Impossibility of Queer Life: Representations of Queerness in Katherine
Mansfield’s ‘At the Bay’ ” (essay)

Mie Kumin ’21 (Sociology/Anthropology, Gender Studies and Russian Studies minor)
“Свои/Чужие [Ours/Others]: Sexual Others of the Imaginary Elsewhere” (essay)

2019–20 Recipients:

Amaris Bouchard ’20 (Sociology/Anthropology)
Howl Together: An Ethnography for my Grandmother” (essay)

Maura Phillips ’20 (English)
The Edges of Imagination: Women, Art, and Desire in Keats’s Late Romances” (essay)

2018–19 Recipients:

Madeleine Bentley (Sociology/Anthropology)
Not just ‘like a love affair.’ Tracing the personal in narratives of sexual arousal while breastfeeding” (essay) 

Mira Glasser (Rhetoric and Media Studies)
Queering the Self in Illness: Katherine Mansfields to Katherine Mansfields” (essay)

2017–18 Recipients:

Eva Gellman (English)
“The Slipperiness of the Sublime in Eavan Boland’s “The Woman Who Turns Herself Into A Fish”” (essay)

Mikay Parsons (Psychology)
“Cultural Intelligibility and the Policing of Gender: The Tension Between Butler’s Theory of Performativity and Personal Experience” (essay)

2016–17 Recipients:

Erin Keoppen (Rhetoric & Media Studies)            
“Wild Words: Space, Place and Gender in Tamil Feminist Poetry and Prose” (essay)

Sully Pujol (English/Hispanic Studies)                   
“‘Beauty is Truth, Truth Art(ifice)’: Female Creative Agency in John Keats’s Isabella, Lamia, and The Eve of St. Agnes” (essay)

2015–16 Recipients:

Angie Epifano (Art History)
“A Veiled Revolution: The Photographs of Angèle Etoudi Essamba” (essay)

Eva Goellner (Rhetoric & Media Studies) “Problematizing “Strong”: Why the Strong Female Character is No Longer Enough” (essay)

2014–15 Recipients:

Annabel Saliba Carroll (English)
“The Roles of Illness in the Works of Virginia Woolf” (essay)

Emma Post (English)
“We Begin Our Tour of the Female Muse” (poetry) 

2013–14 Recipients:

 Laura Houlberg (Environmental Studies),
“Exclusive Environments: Transmisogyny in U.S. Environmentalism” (senior thesis)

  Gus Wolff (Political Science),
“A Kind of Love: A Decade of Camp and Me” (essay) 

2012–13 Recipients:

 Eline Leemans (Sociology/Anthropology)
“Crafting Reproductive Rights Through Social Practice Art” (senior thesis)

 Faolán Thompson (History)
“Quiet Anxiety: Women, Domesticity, and Confinement” (essay)

2011–12 Recipients:

Kemiyondo Coutinho (Theatre/Rhetoric and Media Studies) 
“Kawuna…You’re It” (original one-woman play)

Kathryn Kucera (Sociology/Anthropology)
“A Case for the Radical Potential of a Cyborg Poet” (essay)

2010–11 Recipients:

Rhiannon Troutman (Sociology/Anthropology)
Transitions of Crisis: Building ‘Home’ for Transgender Youth Transitioning Out of Foster Care” (essay) 

Arielle White (Biology)
“Redefining Cultural Citizenship to Escape Patriarchal Politics” (essay)

2009–10 Recipients:

William Haines (English)
“Fluidity: Gender, Bodily Fluids and the Grotesque Language of Alexander Pope” (essay)

 Maile Speakman  (Sociology/Anthropology)
No Hay Manera Apagar el Ocio (They Can’t Stop the Leisure): Queer and Countercultural Space in Contemporary Havana” (essay)  

 2008–09 Recipients:

Kimberly Fanshier (Theatre)
“Bad Hour” (original play)

Kacie Dalziel (Sociology/Anthropology)
“Long Live the King! Gender Performance and the Politics of Drag Kings” (essay)

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Thank you to Dorothy Berkson’s family, friends, and colleagues, whose generous contributions have made this award possible.