Named for a long-standing, former Chair of the English Department, the Nancy Comley Prize was established in 2012 to honor the best essay written by a graduate student matriculated in the MA, MS Ed, or MAT programs. The prize is sponsored by the English Department Alumni Fund. Submission guidelines are distributed in March of each year. The prize winner(s) are honored in a department ceremony in May.

Nancy Comley Prize Winners

2022 – Arianna Frisina, “Oliphant’s The Library Window as an Exploration of Victorian Theories of Consciousness, Imagination, and Phantasmagoria”

2021 – Rani Srinivasan, “Emerging from the ‘Impregnable Cocoon’: Liminality in The God of Small Things and Postcolonial India”

2020 – Farrah Goff, “Sincerely, Olivia Fairfield: Ideas of Power and Autonomy in the Letters of The Woman of Colour”

2019 – Meaghan Dodson, “The Laughter of the Mohicans: A New Linguistic Analysis”

2018 – Tenisha McDonald, “A Black Narrative Voice: Genre, Authorship, and Authenticity in The History of Mary Prince: A West Indian Slave Narrative”

2018 – Amanda Torres, “‘I put it down on paper and then the ghost does not ache so much’: The House on Mango Street as a Woman of Color Feminist Response to Intersectional Trauma”

2017 – Beth Sherman, “‘So Uncommon a Society’: A Utopian Model of Friendship in Millenium Hall”

2016 – Frankie Romano, “The Matter of the Text: Queerness, Identity, and Proximity in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home”

2015 – Elaine Housseas, “’What are you blind?… No You Are’: Blindness as Queer Vision in Carla Trujillo’s What Night Brings”

2014 – Steven Hopkinson, “The Genre App”

2014 – Michael Orbach, “Sex, Bravado and Biblical Criticism: Moloch’s Role in Paradise Lost”

2013 – Rayshma Arjune, “The Gypsy in Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights: Heathcliff and the Racial Overtones of the Romany People”

2012 – Lauren Jahoda, “(Un)happy Mediums: Spiegelman’s Maus I & II and the Holocaust Photograph”

The MA Conference Committee chooses a Best Presentation Prize winner among the presentations delivered at our annual QC English Graduate Conference, which gives Master’s students an opportunity to share their work and participate in a vital aspect of academic life. 

2022 – Victoria Morris, “Reading Klara and the Sun through the Lens of Structural Violence in Our Society” 

2021 –  No award given. 

2020 – No award given.

2019 – Alicia Farouk, “Esther Greenwood’s Pursuit of the ‘Womb-Tomb’ in Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar”

2018 –  Amanda Torres, “When Love Is Not Enough: Queer Utopian Coalition in Response to the Pulse Shooting” [an expanded and revised version of this paper was published on Post45 Contemporaries]

2017 – Emily Jennings, To be almost seemed to be worse than being not at all”: The Collective Memory and Revision in Patricia Park’s Re Jane.”

2016 – Frankie Romano, “The Matter of the Text: Queerness, Identity, and Proximity in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home” 

2015 – Steven Herran,  “Rehashed: Structural Orientalism in Craig Thompson’s Habibi”