Essay Prize

The professorships of American Literature and British Literature at the University of Erfurt announce the 2020 Essay Prize for scholarly papers in literatures in English. All students enrolled in the B Ang 2012 and B Lit 2012 (with a specialization in anglophone literatures) during the academic year of 2019-20 are eligible to participate in this competition. We will consider seminar papers and BA thesis papers that were submitted in the course of the academic year 2019-20. The best paper will be selected in a blind review process by a committee of faculty members and the finalist will be awarded with a gift certificate of Buchhandlung Peterknecht.

Deadline:  Friday, 27 November 2020

Guidelines

Papers eligible for the award include papers in the fields of American and/or British literatures and cultures during the academic year of 2019/20, more specifically between October 2019 and September 2020. 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.

Your submission will be evaluated anonymously by two reviewers who are not the instructors for the seminar, in which you wrote the paper. Winners will be notified by email and announced and celebrated on our departmental website.  We thank our sponsors at Buchhandlung Peterknecht for their support!

Each student is eligible to submit one essay under the terms delineated above. Select that paper which you feel might be competitive with “the best of the best” written by other students this year. To submit, either leave a clean copy of your paper (without instructors’ comments but also without any further revision on your part) with Ms. Yvonne Kirmse, assistant to the English Department (Office: MG1/709 or Mailbox in MG1/615) or send in a clean pdf-copy of your paper via email to Antonia Purk at antonia.purk@uni-erfurt.de. Include a cover page, which states “2020 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 providing my instructor with 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.”