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Horst Frenz Prize

Award Description

The Horst Frenz Prize is awarded to the best paper presented by a graduate student at the annual meeting of the ACLA. The Horst Frenz Prize includes a $500 cash award, complimentary registration to the ACLA Annual Meeting, and a travel reimbursement grant of up to $500 to attend the following year's ACLA Annual Meeting to receive the award in person.

If you heard an outstanding presentation by a graduate student at the 2024 Annual Meeting, please pass along as much information as possible (name of presenter, paper title, e-mail, etc.) to the ACLA Secretariat via the ACLA's Horst Frenz Prize nomination form below. It is helpful to explain why you admire the paper. Nominations are due by August 26, 2024.

2024-2025 Horst Frenz Prize Committee

J. Scott Miller (Chair)
Brigham Young University
 
Janet A. Walker
Rutgers University
 
Pavel Andrade
Texas Tech University

 

Nominate a Paper
 

Previous Frenz prize winners
  • Viola Bao (Northwestern University), "Diasporic Cultural Revolutions: Talks at Yan'an in the Black Arts Movement." CITATION (2024)
  • Kodai Abe (Binghamton University), "The Transpacific Afterlife of Korean Comfort Women." CITATION (2023)
  • Honorable Mention: Liam Kruger (University of Wisconsin-Madison), "Dangers of a Single History." (2022)
  • Angela Haddad (New York University), "Eastern Mediterranean Migrant Entanglements: Orientalism and the Historical Novel." CITATION (2021)
  • Emily Sibley (Ph.D. NYU, now at Whitman College), "The Ties That Don't Bind: Decolonization, Theater, and the Egyptian Avant-Garde." CITATION (2020)
  • Karolina Watroba, Merton College, Oxford, for her paper “German Undone in Thomas Mann’s ‘The Magic Mountain’” (CITATION) (2019)
  • Honorable Mention: Tingting Hui, Leiden University, for her paper “"Words that 'I Swallowed Whole': The Linguistic Edibility of Yoko Tawada's Exophonic Writings” (CITATION)
  • JOINT WINNERS: Brahim El Guabli (Princeton University) for his essay, "Remembering the Algerian War: Towards Complementarity of Memories” (CITATION) AND Tera Reid-Olds (University of Oregon) titled, “Mobility and Memory for the Storyteller-in-Exile” (2018). (CITATION)
  • Honorable Mention: Lonneke Geerlings (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) for her paper, “The ‘American Invasion’ at 23a High Point, London. Rosey E. Pool’s Home as a “Contact Zone’ of the Black Atlantic During the 1950s." (2018)
  • Yael Kenan (University of Michigan) for her paper, "'Dialogue in Monologue': Addressing Darwish in Hebrew" (2017). (CITATION)
  • Honorable Mention: Ethan Reed (University of Virginia) for his paper, "'I heard that Voice in Troy': Resonance and Entanglement in Walcott's The Odyssey: A Stage Version" (2017). (CITATION)
  • Amanda Mazur (Princeton University), for her paper, "Chamoiseau’s Literary Creolization: The Stylistic Potential of a Vernacular". (2016). (CITATION)
    Honorable Mention: Meg Arenberg (Indiana University), for her paper, "The Disenchantment of the World: Intertextuality and Disillusionment in Euphrase Kezilahabi’s Nagona and Mzingile" (2016). (CITATION)
  • Adhira Mangalagiri (University of Chicago), for her paper, "Worlding Theory: Language as a New Possibility in Literary Theory" (2015). (CITATION)
    Honorable Mention: Kendra Dority (University of California, Santa Cruz), for her paper, "Grammatos | Agrammatos: Illiterate Readers and the Value of Comparative Reading in Athenaeus’ Deipnosophistae" (2015). (CITATION)
  • Katharine Trostel (University of California, Santa Cruz), for her paper, "The Eye that Cries: Macro and Micro Narratives of Memory in Peru Post-Shining Path" (2014). (CITATION)
  • Veli Yashin (Columbia University), for his paper, "Euro(tro)pology: Philology, World Literature, and the Legacy of Erich Auerbach" (2013). (CITATION)
    Honorable Mention: Tom Nurmi (University of Arizona), for his paper, "Corpse Traffic: Trans-Pacific Geographies and the Ethics of Writing in Twain’s Roughing It" (2013). (CITATION)
  • Spencer Scoville (University of Michigan), for his paper, "Reading Russian in the Nahdah: Khalil Baydas as Translator" (2012). (CITATION)
    Honorable Mention: Kendra Dority (University of California, Santa Cruz), for her paper, "Back to the Letter Alpha': Destabilizing Literacy Narratives through Callias’ Grammatike Theoria" (2012). (CITATION)
  • Eugenia Kelbert (Yale University), for her paper "Reborn as René: the Interplay of Self and Language in Rilke's Late French and German Poetry" (2011). (CITATION)
    Honorable Mention: Bhavya Tiwari (University of Texas at Austin), for her paper "Comparative World Literature in India" (2011). (CITATION)
  • Yi-Ping Ong (Harvard University), for her paper "Towards a Life View: Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and the Novel" (2010). (CITATION)
    Honorable Mention: Cecile Guédon (U of London), for her paper "Poetic Gestures, Modernist Choreographies" (2010). (CITATION)
  • Ariel Ross (Emory University), for her paper, "'I Will Move Hell': Virgil's Repetition Compulsion" (2009). (CITATION)
  • Sharareh Frouzesh Bennett (University of California - Irvine), for her paper, "The Politics of Appropriation: Writing, Responsibility, and the Specter of the Native Informant" (2008). (CITATION)
    Honorable Mention: Kyla Schuller (University of California - San Diego), for her paper, "The Fossil and the Photograph: Capturing the ‘Primitive’ in the Museum and Boarding School." (2008) (CITATION)
  • Guilan Siassi (University of California - Los Angeles), for "Dreaming the Body into Words: Translating Affect between Cultures in Khatibi's Amour Bilingue" (2007). (CITATION)
    Honorable Mention: Karen Zumhagen-Yekplé (University of California - Berkeley), for "Puzzle, Parable, and the Limits of the Imagination: The Literary Ethics of Kafka and Wittgenstein" (2007). (CITATION)
  • Maya Barzilai and Katra Byram (University of California - Berkeley), for "The Challenge of Lyric Address in War Poems by Yitzchak Laor and Ingeborg Bachmann" (2006). (CITATION)
  • Geoffrey Baker (Rutgers University), for "Empiricism and Empire: Orientalist Antiquing in Balzac's Peau de chagrin" (2005). (CITATION)
    Honorable Mention: Karen Zumhagen (University of California - Berkeley), for "Image and Riddle as Warning in Ricardo Piglia's Artificial Respiration" (2005). (CITATION)
  • Sarah Casteel (Columbia University), for "Joy Kogawa's Native Envy: New World Discourse in Obasan and Itsuka" (2004). (CITATION)
  • Lida Oukaderova (University of Texas at Austin), for "Money, Translation and Subjectivity in Isaak Babel's "Guy de Maupassant" (2003).
  • Katarzyna Pieprzak (University of Michigan), for "Whose Patrimony Is It Anyway? The Quarrel between Ali Baba's Cave and the National Museums of Morocco" (2002).
    Honorable Mention: Joy Ramirez (University of Colorado), for "The Desert of the Real: Las Vegas" (2002).
  • Esther Gabara (Stanford University), for "Engendering Nation: Mexican Photo-Essays, 1920-1940” (2001).
  • Kristi M. Wilson (University of California - San Diego), for "Nietzsche, Euripides, Philosophy and Philology in the Age of Graecomania" (2000).
    Honorable Mention: Jana Evans Braziel (University of Massachusetts, Amherst), for "De Port-au-Prince a Montreal: Nomad-Exile in Dany Laferriere's Chronique de la derive douce."
  • Steven Adisasmito-Smith (University of Illinois), for "The Self in Transition: British Orientalists, American Transcendentalists, and Sanskrit Scriptures in English" (1999).

Please submit any missing information you might have concerning this compilation to the ACLA.