Undergraduate Awards & Prizes
ISSG honors undergraduates with three annual prizes recognizing outstanding intellectual achievement: the Queer Studies Award, the Women’s and Gender Studies Award, and the Feminist to the Core Essay Prize.
The Queer Studies Award, inaugurated in 1994, honors an undergraduate for excellence in research and writing in Queer Studies. Winning submissions demonstrate clarity, originality, ambition, and are informed by or engaged in critical issues in Queer Studies.
The Women’s and Gender Studies Award, inaugurated in 2007, honors an undergraduate for excellence in research and writing in the fields of Women and Gender Studies. Winning submissions demonstrate clarity, originality, ambition, and are informed by or engaged in critical issues in Women’s and Gender Studies.
The Feminist to the Core Essay Prize, inaugurated in 2017, is awarded annually to the undergraduate who is judged by the IRWGS prize committee to have written the best essay on any topic in Feminist or Queer Studies in one of the following Core courses:
- Literature Humanities
- Contemporary Civilization
- Art Humanities
- Music Humanities
Undergraduates are invited to compete for all three awards in a give year, but may not submit the same essay for consideration for multiple awards.
Additional questions? Contact us at 212.854.3277 or by email at [email protected].
2024 Essay Prize & Award Applications
The application cycle for 2024 essay prizes and awards is now open. The deadline for submission is 11:59PM on Friday, March 29, 2024. More information about each award and the submission instructions is located in the documents in the sidebar on the right.
Previous Winners
2023
Trevor Kodzis,“Policing Queer Spaces in Porfirian Mexico City”
Larkin White, “Flaunting Pure Beauty: Transfemme Epistemology in Jackie Curtis' Vain Victory” (Honorable Mention)
2022
Anja Chivukula, "Handmade Trajectories: Embodiment and Failure in Anna Anthropy’s dys4ia"
Mac Waters, “The Castrated Castor: Emasculation and Chastity in the Medieval Bestiary” (Honorable Mention)
2021
Jenna Zucker, "We're Jews! Jews! Jews!: Queering Third Generation Holocaust Memory"
2020
Em Rosner, “‘We have all participated’: Abu Ghraib, Homonationalism,
and the Rationalization of Modern Torture”
2019
Sandra Goldstein Lehnert, “Sex, Text, Self: Euphuism and Re/Con/Figuration in Lyly’s Gallathea”
2018
Sadie Yudkin, “The Future is Here, It’s Queer: Contemporary New York City Music Scenes as Queer Theory in Practice and Praxis”
2017
Sona Armenouhi Quigley, “Quelle Surprise!”
2016
Thando Mlambo, “Destabilizing Nation and Culture: How Zanele Muholi and Queer South African Women are Creating Discursive Space through Visual Culture”
2014
Harris Mercer, “Out Of The Shadows Of Plague: Transmission, Protection, and Tony Kushner’s Queer Tomorrow”
2013
Jessica Shollenberger, “‘Nothing Pleases Me Except Dinner: Eating Sex and Queering Eating in Gertrude Stein’s ‘Lifting Belly.’”
2012
Lauren Herold, “RuPaul’s Drag Race is Burning: Performances of Femininity and Neoliberalism in ‘Post-Racial’ America”
2011
Erin Meyer, “Gay Fathers: Disrupting Sex Stereotyping and Challenging the Father-Promotion Crusade”
2010
Anna Steffens, “‘Another Androgynous Freak Show’: The ‘Pregnant Man’ and Transgender Politics in American Pop Culture”
2009
Shira Burton, “Out in the In Crowd: ‘Thinking Sex’ and Today’s Movement for Gay Rights”
2008
Daniel Altabef, “Private Sex – Public Performance”
2007
Jonah Hassenfeld, “Methodological Critique: An Archeology of Narrative”
Chad Miller, “The Queering of St. Sebastian: Collective Memory and the Emergence of Gay Spirituality” (Honorable Mention)
2006
Kat Lewis, “Multi-Issue Organizing in the New York Gay Liberation Front, 1969-1971”
2023
Emma Press,“Reality TV’s Woke Efforts in Post-BLM America: The Emergence and Exploitation of the ‘Forgiving Educator’”
Mira Mason, “He Isn’t “‘Charley’s Aunt’: Julian Eltinge and Female Impersonation On Stage and On Screen” (Honorable Mention)
2022
Anja Chivukula, “'A College Issue': Depictions of Universities in Consent Education Materials"
Alexandra Volgyesi, “Making ‘Dyke Slope’: Lesbian Feminist Organizing and the Emergence of Park Slope as a Lesbian Neighborhood" (Honorable Mention)
2021
Liz Irvin, "The Rebiologization of Gender, Race, and Class in Environmental Toxicology Research on Low-Level Childhood Lead Exposures"
2020
Amelia Roskin-Frazee, “Offending the State: The Gendered and Racialized Violence of the Sex Offender Registry”
Eliza Siegel, “Jews-as-Syphilis: Metaphor, Science, and Tenuous Reality in Nazi Germany”
2019
Poorvi Bellur, “Disjointed Narratives: Tracing the History of Purity, Nationalism and Gender in South Indian Dance in the Early 20th Century”
2018
Edward Alexander Crouse, “Sylvia on Trial: Sedition, Censorship and Civil Liberties in 1921″
2017
Rebecca Claire Fisher, “The Separate Spheres Argument Against Women’s Jury Service: A Review of the Literature
2016
Sarah Faith Thompson, “Sexual Violence in Civil Wars: Strength, Organizational Control, and Rebel Groups”
2015
Caitlin Lowell, “Justice Is Not An Institution: The University of Michigan and the Alternate Responses to Sexual Violence on Campus”
2014
Taylor Clarke, “My Career As A Machine: Siri and Human Bodies in Servitude”
2013
Callie Strickland, “Policing Strategies of Prostitution in the US: A Closer Look at Street Prostitution in New York City”
2012
Joseph Daly, “An Exception to Prove the Rule: The Publishing Career of Louisa McCord and the Applicability of Separate Spheres in Antebellum South Carolina”
2011
SaraEllen Strongman, “The New ‘Magic Negroes’: Non-White Women as Transformational Agents in Disney Animated Films”
2010
Chloe Smith, “Ladies and Females: Women’s Missionary and Educational Work in Nineteenth-Century India”
2023
Ari Yao, “Poem 25, "Vanished": The Queer Spacetime of the Beloved in Ibn ‘Arabī’s Tarjumān"
Daniel Wolf Shneider, “Painting While Naked: Representations of Homosexuality and Masculine Body Anxiety in Early Modern Literature” (Honorable Mention)
2022
Kyle Frank, “A Magical Critique of Chivalric Homosociality: Queer Knights in Marie de France’s Guigemar and Lanval”
2021
Sam Hyman, "Gender and Family in Marx and Engels' "The German Ideology": Heteropatriarchal Critique in both the Text and its Reading"
Christina Clark, "Textu(r)al Evidence: The Underlying Gender Politics of Virginia Woolf's Musical Language in To The Lighthouse"
2020
David Ehmcke, “To Tune the Ear Toward the Celestial: Techno-Musical Innovation and Feminist Mobilities in the Long History of Musical Expressionism”
2018
Clara Beccaro, “(M)adam and (St)eve: Queer Theory in Paradise Lost”