The Emilia Ferrara Thesis Award
The Emilia Ferrara Thesis Award recognizes the two students whose theses the English Honors Committee deems most outstanding. Honorees receive their medals and a check at the Department of English Commencement Reception in the spring, and a notation for each recipient appears in the College’s Tropaia Program.
2024 Award Winners

David Edwards
Thesis title: “All Plots Tend to Move Deathward”: The Death Drive in the Photography and Television of White Noise”

Josephine Wu
Thesis title: 7 Ways to Kill Your Mother
2023 Award Winners

Caitlin Baskin
Thesis title: Realism, Formalism, and the Drug Film: Representations of Addiction in Twenty-First-Century Film and Television

Audrey Hall
Thesis title: Spun
2022 Award Winners

Jon Pejo
Thesis title: Colonial Son: True Stories of a Filipino Immigrant

Maddie Kearney
Thesis title: If You Are Still Alive, Raise Your Hand: A Trans/Crip Archive of Life in the Poetics of Death
2021 Award Winners

Charlie Goetzman
Thesis title: ‘Chaos Bewitched’: New Materialism, Old Materialism, and Melvillean Assemblage in Moby-Dick

Glen Waters
Thesis title: “To Grow a Peach Tree”
2020 Award Winners

Narisa Buranasiri
Thesis title: Monsoon with Paper Boats

Rachel Biggio
Thesis Title: [sick]: Women’s Embodiment in Mansfield Park and Jane Eyre
2019 Award Winners

Clare Foley
Thesis Title: To Tweet or Not to Tweet

Anne Marie Hawley
Thesis Title: Angels in Retrospect: Reassessing Representation in Tony Kushner’s Epic
2018 Award Winners

Lauren Rubino
Thesis Title: Hyssop of Life, or take my word for it

Susannah Price
Theis Title: Beyond the Bell-Shaped Curve: Non-Normativity in Poor Miss Finch
2017 Award Winners

Erika Bullock
Thesis Title: Gaming Genre: Towards a Systems-View of Genre in the Modern Video Game

Jinwoo Chong
Theis Title: void nation
2016 English Honors Thesis Award Winners

Jane McDonough
Thesis Title: Enter Religion, Stage Left: The Female Character’s Onstage Development in Early Modern England and Spain

Bassam Sidiki
Thesis Title: The Secret Gardens of the Self: The Treatment of Bodies in William Carlos Williams and Poetic Responses
Honorable Mention

Natasha Khan
Thesis Title:
The Seas In Between