Student Resources

Essay Prize for Scholarly Papers in American and English Literature

Past Winning Papers

Winning Papers

2023
Jessica König. "Nature and its 'Larger, Darker, Deeper Part' – Negotiating Transcendentalism in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick"

2022
Ciara Olzog. "One Event, Two Reactions: How 9/11 Managed to Simultaneously Catapult America into the Past and Future."

2021
Anika Leonie Färber. "The Oeuvre as the Result of the Identity Crisis."

2018
Maja-Felicia Kristan. "A Graphic Memoir: The Perception of Authenticity in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home."

2017
Kaylie-Anne Ward. "The Unfinished Project of Freedom in Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad."

2016
Janne Lilkendey. "The Origin of King Lear's Power."

Guidelines 2024 Essay Prize

Rückenansicht Wanderer auf Klippe — Gutschein von buchbar

The Essay Prize is awarded once during the academic year for a particularly well argued, thoroughly researched, and eloquently written student paper. Students may submit their papers according to the guidelines below in the fall of each year. Lecturers are very welcome to nominate students or encourage the submission of papers. Your submission will be evaluated anonymously by two reviewers who are not the instructors for the seminar in which you wrote the paper. The winner will be notified by email and announced in December and celebrated on our departmental website. The winner will receive a 30€ book voucher sponsored by buchbar Erfurt.

Guidelines of the Essay Prize 2024:

Papers eligible for the award include papers in the fields of American and/or British literatures and cultures during the academic year of 2023/24 (October 2023 - September 2024). Submissions can be both traditional (textual analysis) and non-traditional papers (alternatives to textual analysis in method or subject). BA thesis papers are also eligible. All papers must be submitted to the English Department following the procedure described below:

Each student is eligible to submit one essay under the terms delineated above.
Please only submit clean copies (without instructors’ comments but also without any further revision on your part).
Include a cover page, which states “2024 Essay Prize Competition,” the date of submission, the title of the course and name of instructor, your own name and pledge.
For the pledge on the cover page, please write out this variation of the honor code and sign it (if submitting via email, include a digital signature): “I pledge that I have neither given nor received any unauthorized aid during the completion of this work. I am submitting an identical copy of the original, with no other changes except this title page, and (if they were missing from the original) numbers on the upper right-hand top of the page, and MLA documentation of all sources in a Works Cited page.”

To submit, please send a pdf-copy of your paper to Verena Ferda: verena.ferda@uni-erfurt.de

The deadline for the 2024 Prize is October 31st.

We thank our sponsors at buchbar Erfurt for their support!