The Charles Bernheimer Prize

The Bernheimer Prize goes to the best dissertation nominated by a department or program that is an Institutional Member of the ACLA. The dissertation must be completed by July 1, 2008. Each institutional member may nominate one dissertation in the field of comparative literature, identified as the best without regard to actual departmental affiliation. The prize carries an award of $1000 and a certificate. The winner will be announced at the next annual meeting of the ACLA.

Congratulations to the winner of the 2008 Bernheimer Prize:

Marisa Galvez (Stanford University), for her dissertation, "Medium as Genre: A Historical Phenomenology of the Medieval Songbook in the Occitan, German, and Castilian Traditions" (CITATION)

To nominate a dissertation for the 2009 Bernheimer Prize, please notify both the ACLA secretariat, Elizabeth Richmond-Garza, and the chair of the committee by November 15, 2008.

Nominators should submit a letter or report of one or two pages, outlining the exceptional qualities of the nominated dissertation. Copies of the nominating letter should be sent, along with copies of the dissertation, to each member of the committee.

The prize committee for 2009 will be announced shortly.

All submissions must be hard copy. No electronic submissions accepted.

THE DEADLINE FOR NOMINATION AND SUBMISSION OF THE DISSERTATION IS NOVEMBER 15, 2008.

Previous Bernheimer winners:

• Karen Laura Thornber (Harvard University), for "Cultures and Texts in Motion: Negotiating and Reconfiguring Japan and Japanese Literature in Polyintertextual East Asian Contact Zones (Japan, Semicolonial China, Colonial Korea, Colonial Taiwan)" (2007). (CITATION)
• Ilya Kliger (Yale University), for "Truth, Time and the Novel: Veridiction in Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Balzac" (2006). (CITATION)
  Honorable Mention: Irene Perciali (University of California - Berkeley), for "Personifying Capitalism: Economic Imagination, the Novel, and the Entrepreneur" (2006). (CITATION)
• Shaden Tageldin (University of California - Berkeley), for "Disarming Words: Reading (Post)Colonial Egypt's Double Bond to Europe" (2005). (CITATION)
  Honorable Mention: Jutta Maria Gsoels-Lorensen (Yale University), for "Epitaphic Remembrance: Representing a Catastrophic Past in Second Generation Texts" (2005). (CITATION)
• Stephanie Glaser (Indiana University), for "Explorations of the Gothic Cathedral in Nineteenth-Century France" (2004). (CITATION)
• Emily Wilson (Yale University), for "'Why do I Overlive?' Greek, Latin, and English Tragic Survival" (2003).
• Christopher Paul Bush (University of California - Los Angeles), for "Ideographies: Figures of China and Japan in Modern French Literature" (2002).
  Runners up: Aiko Okamoto MacPhail (Indiana University), for "Imagining Modernity: European Japonism and Japanese Westernism" (2002) and Max Statkiewicz (State University of New York - Stony Brook), for "Theatrum Platonicum: New Perspectives on the 'Old Quarrel' between Philosophy and the Theater" (2002).