2025 Critical Prize Winners

Quantá Holden | Duke English Communications Strategist

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Duke English is excited to announce the winners of our 2025 Critical Essay and Department awards!

Stanley E. Fish Award for Outstanding Work in British & Anglophone Literature

Octavia Chilkoti, ’25 - A Spectral Image Renewed: Recursive Dialogues Between Phantasmagoria and Gothic Fiction

This award recognizes outstanding work by an undergraduate enrolled in an English course in British Literature.

 

Louis J. Budd Award for Outstanding Work in American Literature

Charlotte Gehring, '25 - Fatal Attraction: Murder and the American Dream in 20th- and 21st-Century American Literature

 

Barbara Herrnstein Smith Award for Outstanding Work in Literary Theory

Arielle Stern, ’25 - Inventions of Farewell: The Non-Phenomenality of Death in Modernist Poetics

This award recognizes outstanding work by an undergraduate enrolled in an English literary theory or criticism course.

 

Victor Strandberg Award for Excellence in the Literary Arts

This award, made possible by the Seinfeld family, recognizes an undergraduate for excellence in the literary arts.

Co-winners: 

Natalie Farris, ’25 - “Christina Hans” and selected nonfiction

Charlotte Haidar, “Women in Absentia”

 

Most Original Thesis

Tyler King, '25 - Subluminal Messages

This award recognizes a senior student for writing the most original honors thesis.

 

Critical Essay Prize

Each year, Duke English sponsors a critical essay competition for essays written by any Duke undergraduate enrolled in an English department course.  Submissions must be critical essays of nonfiction produced for a class during the current academic year in which the student is enrolled.

Trisha Santanam, ’26 - “Jailhouse Blues: The Music of Parchman Farm”

Honorable Mentions:  

  • Sarine Krovitz, ’25 - “The Bookseller and the Self-Hating Jew: On Mihail Sebastian’s For Two Thousand Years”
  • Annabel Tang, ’27 - “Magical Realism, Cultural Hegemony, and the Problem of Canonization in Song of Solomon”

 

Bascom Headen Palmer Literary Prize

Awarded annually by the Program in Literature to recognize the best senior honors thesis in literary study each spring. Faculty nominate annually in early April. 

Vivian Guo, ’25 - “The Ethics of Melancholia: Lacan, Loss, and the Limits of Meaning in Everything Everywhere All At Once”