The Class Day 2022 celebration for the Department of English heralded a return to an in-person festivities. This year's celebration was held Monday, May 23, 2023 at 1:30 p.m. in McCosh 50.  

With over one hundred attendees present, including concentrators, students, faculty, and friends, the department celebrated our forty English concentrators from the Class of 2022.

As part of the festivities, the Director of Undergraduate Studies and Murray Professor of English Literature, Professor Claudia Johnson, and Academic Chair of the Department, Professor Simon Gikandi, welcomed and celebrated the Class of 2022, their families and friends, and our faculty in a return to our traditional celebration of our graduating concentrators. Announced were our undergraduate concentrators and their theses and any senior thesis prizes that were awarded.

The afternoon’s celebration concluded with the department’s presentation of a short film of the concentrators and faculty sharing brief passages of literature that inspires them in celebration of our recent graduates. After the celebration, attendees gathered under the tent on McCosh Courtyard to share stories of undergraduate life and welcome friends and family. 

Please find a recording of our 2022 Class Day celebration here (link is external).

Please find a pdf copy of our 2022 Class Day Program listing our concentrators, their theses, and any department senior thesis prizes here (link is external).

2022 Senior Thesis Prize Winners

Senior Comprehensive Prize                

Tim Peterson 

Earl R. Miner Prize                   

Ana Mariana Sotomayor Palomino for " Reading Illegible, Illegal Labor: An Analysis of the Queer, Indigenous, and Undocumented Works of Alán Pelaez Lopez"           

Alan S. Downer Prize               

Silma Berrada for “The Bittersweet Ballad of Blessed (& Messiah)"

Charles William Kennedy Prize             

Cammie Lee for "The Entropy of Smell: Theorizing a Logic of Olfaction through the Art and Literature of Asian Women."          

Walter C. Hughes Memorial Prize                     

Co-winner, Patrick Macdonald for "Bleach for the Bughouse: Methods to Madness in the Asylum Film"

Co-winner, Samantha Liu for ""How Taste Remembers Life": Food, Consumption, and the Asian American Appetite."

Class of 1859 Prize                   

Co-winner, Noah Altshuler for " Godric-Speak: Historical Fiction, Historical Linguistics, and Artificial Language in Frederick Buechner's Godric (1980)."

Co-winner, Cammie Lee for " The Entropy of Smell: Theorizing a Logic of Olfaction through the Art and Literature of Asian Women."

Lee M. Elman Class of 1958 Hemingway Prize               

Co-winner, Lucy Dever for "Cryptologus: Symbolism in Monster Media from Medieval Bestiaries to Contemporary Cryptid Culture."

Co-winner, Zandra Campbell for "Agatha Christie: The Sparkling Art of Murder."

Thomas Maren Prize                

Margaret King for " The One and the Many: Examining Boundaries of Self, Collectivity, and Genre in Speculative, Femme-Authored Short Fiction."

Edward H. Tumin Prize             

Zora Arum for “A Procession of Particulars: The Preservation of Organic Unity in Woolf's Corpus.”             

Class of 1870 Old English Prize             

Jiwon Yun

Thomas B. Wanamaker Prize               

Noah Altshuler for " Godric-Speak: Historical Fiction, Historical Linguistics, and Artificial Language in Frederick Buechner's Godric (1980)."      

Isidore and Helen Sacks Memorial Prize           

Sandra Yang for " Ghosts in a Broken Shell: Illness, Labor, and the Paradoxes of Asian American Embodiment in Severance and The Woman Warrior."

Outside Department Thesis Prizes                    

Asher Hinds Prize

Winner, Cammie Lee for "The Entropy of Smell: Theorizing a Logic of Olfaction through the Art and Literature of Asian Women."          

Suzanne M. Huffman Memorial Senior Thesis Prize

Second place co-winner, Cammie Lee for "The Entropy of Smell: Theorizing a Logic of Olfaction through the Art and Literature of Asian Women."          

Fulbright (Korea)

Cammie Lee

2022 Class of 2023 Junior Paper Prizes                         

Class of 1870 Junior Prize          Given to a student(s) for being the best scholar in English Literature.      

Co-winner, Alexandra Gjaja ’23

Co-winner, Noa Greenspan ‘23

Emily Ebert Prize                      For a junior who has written an outstanding junior paper.          

Co-winner, Sam Himmelfarb ’23

Co-winner, Hana Widerman ’23