The Elizabethan Club at Yale University awards prizes for the best undergraduate or graduate essay or dissertation on subjects of interest to the Club:
- Outstanding work on literature, arts, or culture of the Renaissance
- Outstanding work on interpretations, re-creation, or criticism relating to literature, arts, and culture of the Renaissance.
- Outstanding work based on research done in the Elizabethan Club Library (used at the Beinecke Library).
A call for submissions can be found at this link. The deadline is April 22, 2024. Work from any department is eligible and nominations can come from faculty, advisors, or the students themselves. The competition is open to all Yale students, regardless of department. They do not need to be members of the Club.
Past Awardees
2022-23
Benjamin Card “Reading for Heresy in the Career of Thomas Barlow” [graduate essay]
Anna Fleming “Translation as Creation” [undergraduate essay]
Sophia Richardson “Reading the Surface in Early Modern English Literature” [graduate essay]
Sarah Ana Seligman “A Mystical Apotheosis in the Court of the Sun King” [graduate essay, honorable mention]
Melia Young “Helen Cam, Marie Borroff, and Reform in American Medieval Studies During theTwentieth Century” [undergraduate essay]
2021-22
Giacomo Berchi “The Son and the Sea” [graduate essay, honorable mention]
Eve Elizabeth Houghton “ ‘I am always so sorry to antagonize collectors:’ Henrietta Bartlett and the 1916 Census of Shakespeare Quartos.” [graduate essay]
Kyung Mi Lee “Hester Pulter’s Double Lives.” [undergraduate essay]
Charlie Mayhew “Erra Pater and the Early Modern English Tradition of Lowbow Astrology: A History from Wisdom to Punchline.” [undergraduate essay]
2020-21
Clio Doyle “Enough of the Oak” [graduate essay]
Julia Gourary “Imagining the Intimate: The Female Body in Charles Estienne’s Anatomy” [undergraduate essay]
Sophia Richardson “Venus’s Glass: Hero and Leander and the Erotics of Resemblance” [graduate essay]
2019-20
Max M. Graham “‘Tending to Wild’: Wilderness and the Trouble with Ecology in Paradise Lost” [undergraduate essay]
Mohit Manohar “A Monumental Gift from a Slave to his Master: The Chand Minar at Daulatabad” [graduate essay]
2018-19
Andrew Stewart Brown “Our Own Great Deputy: Speaking for the Sovereign in Measure for Measure and King John” in “Artificial Persons: Fictions of Representation in Early Modern Drama.” [graduate essay, chapter of dissertation]
Luke Ciancarelli “A Time to Love: Toward a Dialectical Reading of Paradise Lost.” [undergraduate essay]
Daniel Flesch “Time their troubler: Stasis, decay, and seduction in the song of Acrasia’s Bower.” [undergraduate essay, honorable mention]
Sharmaine Koh Mingli “Bad and Beautiful: Reading Eve’s Twofold Beauty as an Alternative Account of Theodicy.” [undergraduate essay]
2017-18
Baricz, Carla. “Early Modern Two-Part and Sequel Drama, 1490-1590.” [dissertation]
Lichtenberg, Drew. “Thrilling Juxtapositions: Thoughts on Half the Canon.” [graduate essay]
Norman, Max. “Early Modern Essays and the Limits of Knowledge: Montaigne, Browne, and the Essay Form.” [undergraduate essay]
Romm, Jacob. “‘Sonnets As My Martyrdom’: Agrippa d’Aubigné’s Hécatombe à Diane.” [undergraduate essay]
Tang, Oriana. “Vision, Voice, and Women in The Winter’s Tale.” [undergraduate essay, honorable mention]
2016-17
Holden, Robert Bradley. “Milton between the Reformation and Enlightenment: Religion in the Age of Revolution” [dissertation]
Houghton, Eve. “Pretending to Read: Humanist Culture and the Anxieties of Abridgment” [undergraduate essay]
Raizen, Karen Tova. “Adaptations in Arcadia: Orlando furioso on the Eighteenth-century Operatic Stage” [dissertation]
2015-16
Harper, Elizabeth. “Filial Sacrifice and the Dark Heart of Sacred Tragedy: Théodore de Bèze’s Abraham sacrifiant (1550) and Buchanan’s Jephthes sive votum (1554)” [grad essay]
Hunter, Matt. “The Pursuit of Style in Shakespeare’s Drama” [dissertation]
Rush, Rebecca. “Licentious Rhymers: John Donne and the Late-Elizabethan Couplet Revival” [grad essay]
Scholz, Maximilian Miguel. “Exile and the Recasting of the Reformation: Frankfurt am Main, 1554 – 1608” [dissertation]
Tomlin, Duncan. “Santa Croce Basilica and the Florentine Coup d’Style” [undergraduate essay]
2014-15
Harper, Elizabeth. “The future that never is: Troy’s lost children in Euripides, Seneca and Racine”
Levy-Eichel, Mordechai. “‘Into the Mathematical Ocean’: Navigation, Education, and the Expansion of Numeracy in Early Modern England and the Atlantic World.” [dissertation]
Weinreich, Spencer J. “ “Appropriation and Adaptation in Francisco Zumel’s De vitis patrum (Salamanca, 1588).” [undergraduate essay]
2013-14
Kenny, Dylan. “Workaday Worlds: Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Technology, and the Work of Art” [undergraduate essay]
Rush, Rebecca. “Jonson’s Innocent Muse: Female Figures and Anxieties of Control in Early Modern Drama.” [graduate essay]
Weiskott, Eric. “The Durable Alliterative Tradition.” [dissertation]
2012-13
Pérez, Nicolás Medina Mora. “Negations of Nostalgia: Nabokov, Kundera, Bolaño” [undergraduate essay]
Prakas, Tessie. “‘Thou art a figurative, a metaphorical God too’: John Donne and the Aesthetics of Exegesis’” [graduate essay]
Rush, Rebecca. ” ‘This sweet Laborinth’: Fabrication in John Davies’ Orchestra” [graduate essay]
Stein, Daniel. “Cicero’s Oratory and the Roman Forum: An Erasure of Public Space” [undergraduate essay]
2011-12
Baricz, Carla. “Satan Reads Milton: Modes of Romance in Paradise Lost” [graduate essay]
Holden, Robert (Brad). “Homer and Heterodoxy: The Epic Tradition and Milton’s Heretical Atonement” [graduate essay]
Moore, Jeania Ree. “Grounding the American Firmament: The National Mall and the Evolution of American Civil Religion” [undergraduate essay]
Snider, Sage. “Realizing the Fascist Vision: Mussolini’s Construction of Roman History at the Universal Exposition of Rome” [undergraduate essay]
Thun-Hohenstein, Charlotte. ““Mapmakers, Poets, and Playwrights: Imagining the World as Round” [undergraduate essay]
2010-11
Currell, David. “Matter of Scorn: Milton and Satire” [graduate essay]
2009-10
Currell, David. “Tamburlaine’s Other Children: Anatomies of War and Heroic Mockery in Shakespearean Drama” [graduate essay]
Kau, Andrew. “Boileau and the Fate of the Epic” [graduate essay]
2008-09
Komorowski, Michael. “Politic History, Impolitic Laws: Tacitism and the Common Law Mind in Measure for Measure” [graduate essay]
Menges, Hilary. “Monuments, Books, and Readers in Milton’s Early Poetry and Prose” [graduate essay]
2007-08
Currell, David. “Counterfactual and Contingency in Paradise Lost” [graduate essay]
Komorowski, Michael. “Private Property and the Nature of Marvell’s Republicanism” [graduate essay, honorable mention]
2006-07
Currell, David. “The Verbal Purview of Macbeth” [graduate essay]
Saetveit Miles, Laura. “ ‘With a Female Ambition’: Milton’s Righting and Re-Writing of Women in the History of Britain” [graduate essay]
2005-06
Bond, Christopher. “ ‘Prosperin gathering flowers’: A Miltonic Simile in its Mythic Context” [graduate essay]
2004-05
Foster, Brett. “ ‘Whirling Round with This Circumference’: Reading the Stage in Doctor Faustus” [graduate essay]
2003-04
Wilder, Lina Perkins. “Memory’s Performance” [graduate essay]