The Alan Nadel Award for the Best Graduate Student Essay
All graduate students who present papers at the conference are invited to compete for the Alan Nadel Prize for best essay by a graduate student. The winner will receive a copy of a Perkins Prize-winning book of his, her, or their choice and will be encouraged to expand the winning paper for consideration by Narrative. In addition, the 2023 winner will be eligible for $500 toward expenses to attend the 2024 conference.
Submit papers electronically as attachments (Word or PDF) to both judges: Divya Dwivedi (divyadwi@hss.iitd.ac.in) and Brian McAllister (bmcallister@aus.edu). Please title the subject of your email "2023 Nadel Prize." Papers must be received by June 1, 2023. Papers must be unrevised conference presentations and no longer than 2500 words. While formatting changes, correction of typos, and the addition of a Works Cited page are expected, changes to the substance of the argument are not acceptable. The idea is to reward the work presented at the Conference rather than the work done after the Conference.
Current Prize Winner
2021
Claudia Carroll, “Quantifying Reader Theory of Mind Use: Mental State Attribution and Dickensian Characterization”
From the Judges: We found Claudia’s paper to be a very innovative development of current theories of mental state attribution, as well as an insightful take on the interpretive problem involved in the study of Dickens’s characters. Claudia did an excellent job in engaging computational methods without forgetting the detailed human readings that make sense of the numbers produced. The project represents some of the best possibilities for interdisciplinary scholarship and methods to provide new perspective on narrative.
Honorable Mentions:
Mattie Jacobs, “You Laugh or You Groan: Charting the Coincidental and Accidental in Narrative Cinema”
Denise Wong, “You-narration and Anticipatory Shame in the Millennial Novel"
Sean Yeager, “Aesthetic Kinship: When autistic readers find familiarity in fiction”
Past Prize Winners
2021
Kimaya M. Thakur, University of Kentucky: “Remixed Narratives: The Dichotomy of Cinematic Adaptations.”
2019
Esko Suoranta, University of Helsinki, “Failing to Depict Systemic Change in Dave Eggers and William Gibson”.
Honorable mention: Emma Eisenberg, “Modelling Milieu in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford”
2018
Siebe Buijis, Ghent University, “Unnatural Acoustic Spaces in Radio Drama: An Audiological Approach to Narrative Space.”
Honorable Mention: Antonino Sorci, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3, “Aristotelian and/or Nietzschean Narratology."
2017
Valentina Montero-Román, University of Michigan, “Black Women with ‘Real Brains’: Historicizing Unreliable Focalization in Nella Larsen’s Passing.”
2016
Ivan Delazari, Hong Kong Baptist University, “Diegetic Music in Narrative Fiction: Who is Listening, and What is Heard?”
2015
Bridget Donnelly, University of North Carolina, "'Anything could have happened': Unplotting Historical Contingency in Contemporary Hybrid Detective Novels"
2014
Matthew Phillips, Rutgers University, "Thackeray, Character Types, and Victorian Realism"
2013
Nathan Shank, University of Kentucky, "Empathy as Irony in Cognitive Narrative Studies"
2012
Elizabeth Alsop, CUNY Grad Center, "Consensual Speaking in The Ambassadors"
2011
Hannah Courtney, University of New South Wales (Australia): “The Temporality of Consciousness: Thought Representation and the Slowed Scene in Ian McEwan’s Fiction”
Honorable Mention: Jeanne-Marie Jackson, Yale University: “Retreating Reality: Chekhov’s South African Afterlives”
2010
Lasse Gammelgaard, "Lyric and Narrative in Tennyson’s Maud”
2009
Adam Grener (Cornell University), "Dickensian Coincidence and the Textual Logic of Serial Production"
2008
Rachel Hertz Cobb (University of Texas), "'Not All We See Is Worth Hoarding': Minutes, Hours, and Days in George Meredith’s The Egoist"
Julianne Werlin, "Sidney’s Narrator and the Limits of the Arcadia World"
2007
Matthew Garrett (Stanford University), "Early U.S. Novels: Episodic Structure and the Problem of Social Cohesion"
2006
Sarah Copland (University of Toronto), "The Seeing As Trope in Chiang Yee's Silent Traveller Narratives"
Honorable Mentions
Elizabeth F. Evans (University of Wisconsin-Madison), "Maps and Tours: The Spatial Form of Woolf's The Years"
Heather Morton (University of Virginia), "Can You Forgive Him? Alice and the Man who Plotted Her"
2005
Jesse Rosenthal, "Pip's Choices: Autonomy, Ethics, and Narrative Desire"