Jerry Baum Award

The Jerry Baum Award was established in 2007 by the Department of English, alumni, family, and friends to honor the memory of beloved professor of English R. Jerold (Jerry) Baum. Recipient is a senior whose senior seminar paper addresses the relationship between literature and history and is recognized as outstanding by the English faculty.  A monetary prize accompanies the award.

Previous Winners

2023     Aubrey Roché,  “Undiscovered Countries: New Zealand as a Language for Modernist Innovation and Childhood Linguistic Development in Katherine Mansfield’s Prelude and At the Bay”

2022     Ailish Duff, “Against the Grene : A Critical Reimagining of Color in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”

2021     Julianna Volta, “The Art of Collaboration”

2020     Bryan Miller, “One Man in a Century: Nabokov’s Struggles Against History in Bend Sinister and Speak, Memory”

2019     Brendan Nagle, “A Dead World and an Immortal Fish: Virginia Woolf, Montage, and Temporal Collapse”

2018     Eva Gellman, “The Unknown World: Examining Attempts to Claim the Past as Our Own in Edward P. Jones’s The Known World”

2017     Jess Kostka, “Choice and Decision-Making in The Age of Innocence and The Portrait of a Lady”

2016     Deirdre Collins, “The Confessions of Linda Brent, in /Incidents
in the Life of a Slave Girl/, by Harriet Jacobs”

2015     Zane Pais, “Hello Darkness My Old Friend: Mystic Dionysian Implications in St. Erkenwald and Patience”

2014     Marly Williams, “My Solitary Condition: Isolation and the Myth of Reform in Robinson Crusoe”

2013     Heather Spurling, “Patrilineal Preeminence in Absalom, Absalom!”

2012     Claire Burdick,  ”‘A Poet’s Epitaph’: Wordsworth’s Epitaphic Poetics”

2011      Riley Johnson, “Solution, Epiphany, and Physical/Metaphysical Unity in   the Novels of Vladimir Nabokov”

2009     Charles Macquarie, “The Self that Springs from the Shadows: Irresponsibility, Lighting, and the Redefinition of Selfhood in Virginia Woolf’s ‘Streethaunting’

2008     Alice Waarvick, “Desire Gratified: Method and Female Liberation in Blake’s Visions of the Daughters of Albion”