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L. Barry Pick Prize for Best Undergraduate Thesis

Awarded annually for the best thesis written by a student in the English Honors Program.  The deadline is usually end of March; interested students should contact the English Honors Director with questions.

2024

Cagney N. Kelshaw (recipient)

“Dweorgas and Dvergir: Disease, Disorder, and Deviance in Old English and Norse Literature” 

2023

Quinn A. Robinson (co-recipient)

 

“The Experience is Dialect”: Narrative and Resistive Possibilities of Pidgin in

            All I Asking For Is My Body and Rolling the R’s

Sofia E. Sears (co-recipient)

 

Unseamly Girlhoods: Restitching Shirley Jackson’s Hangsaman With Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl

2022

Jane E. Bua (honorable mention)

Honorable Mention for a Critical Creative Honors Thesis

"Translating the Music of Melancholy in Victor Hugo's 'Demain, Dés l' Aube'"

Sumant M. Rao (recipient)

"The Relational Body in Margaret Cavendish's Philosophy: 'New Materialism' and a Feminist History of Science"

2021

Caitlin Quinn (co-recipient)

"'What No Book of Travels Could Inform You of': Constructing the Female Eye Witness in OROONOKO,  OR THE ROYAL SLAVE and THE TURKISH EMBASSY LETTERS"

Jadyn A. Wilensky (co-recipient)

"When Humanity Falls Apart: The Black Women Who Emerge from Poetic Chaos"

2020

Zoe E. Braccia (recipient)

"Payment Received in Full":   Women's Labor Contributions to the Philadelphia Printing Industry at the turn of the 19th Century

2019

Derek J. Willie (recipient)

 

“A Nature Like Some Mighty River”:  Historical Difference and Readerly Subjectivity in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss

 

 

 

2018

Ramathi H. Bandaranayake (honorable mention)

"Medicine's Split Face":  Pat Barker's Regeneration Trilogy and Wartime

Natalie V. Burke (co-recipient)

"From Fact and Reason":  Student Notes by Christopher Hedrick, University of Pennsylvania, 1788-1792

Jeffrey R. Careyva (co-recipient)

"The Hedgehog and the Highway:  Derrida and Knowing the Animal in Poetry"

Karis L. Stephen (honorable mention)

"Black Travel through Time and Space:  Music Videos from Sun Ra to Erykah Badu"

2017

Rebecca E. Pritzker (co-recipient)

"Sensing Sensibility:  Jane Austen's Pedagogical Sympathy"

Nayeli Riano (co-recipient)

Introduction to "Pastorcillos", or "Little Shepherds:"  Exploring a Miscellaneous Manuscript Book from Spain's Early Modern Period

2016

John D Baranik (co-recipient)

"Temporality and Choice in Milton's Middle Sonnets"

Gabriel A. Ojeda-Sague (co-recipient)

"'Another, Then Another':  Gay Male Orgy and Political Futurity"

2015

Carolina I Ortiz (co-recipient)
Julia A Rossi (co-recipient)

2014

Matthew J Fernandez (co-recipient)

"Re-enacting Self, State and Trauma:  Civil War Memory and John Brown's Body 1913-1964:

Brittney P Joyce (honorable mention)

Trawing in Silences:  Intimacy and Authority in the Writing of Junot Diaz

Hannah G Van Sciver (co-recipient)

Quoting Poetry in Contemporary Drama:  Poetry as Resurrection, and Redemption from Death

2013

Alexa M Bryn (recipient)

"The Politics of Crosshatching:  Formal Hybridity in Natasha Trethewey's Native Guard"

2012

Steven R. Green (honorable mention)

Title:  "Out of the Past and onto the Screen:  Christopher Nolan and Blockbuster Noir"

Rebecca A. Levine (recipient)

Title:  "Remains Without Remaining':  Trauma and Melancholia in the Design, Construction, and Destruction of Holocaust Memorials."

2011

Trisha Y. Low (co-recipient)

Title:  "Guts:  On Jack Spicer, Robin Blaser, and a Poetics of Masochism"

Valeria A. Tsygankova (co-recipient)

Title:  "Representing Church and State:  Paratexts of the Authorized Elizabethan Bible"

2010

Maxime D. McKenna (recipient)

Title: "In the Wake of a Fair Use Trial: Incest, Citation and the Legal Legacy of Finnegans Wake"

2009

Brooke S. Palmieri (recipient)
Benjamin J. Wiebracht (recipient)

2008

Meghan M. Daly (honorable mention)
Stephen R. McLaughlin (honorable mention)
Cynthia L. Padera (recipient)

2005

Willa Rohrer (co-recipient)
Amir Shachmurove (co-recipient)

2004

Lynn Huang (recipient)

2003

Sharon Fulton (recipient)

2002

Sara Murphy (co-recipient)
Brenner Thomas (co-recipient)