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