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, 2013. 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 $1,000 and a certificate, as well as complimentary registration, complimentary ticket to the banquet and a travel grant of $300 to facilitate the recipient attending the 2013 conference.

Congratulations to the winner of the 2013 Bernheimer Prize:

Julia Chi Yan Ng (Northwestern University) for her dissertation "Conditions of Impossibility: Failure and Fictions of Perpetual Peace". (CITATION)

Congratulations to the winner of the 2013 Bernheimer Prize honorable mention:

David Simon (University of California, Berkeley) for his dissertation "Careless Engagements: Literature, Science, and the Ethics of Indifference in Early Modernity". (CITATION)

To nominate a dissertation for the 2014 Bernheimer Prize, please notify both the ACLA secretariat, Alexander Beecroft, and the chair of the committee by the deadline of November 1st, 2012.

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. If electronic copies of the materials are available, it is requested that in addition to the hard copies, the electronic copies be e-mailed to the members of the committee.

The prize committee for 2014 will be announced shortly.

You may mail submissions to the 2014 Charles Bernheimer Prize Committee at the following addresses (e-mail addresses are linked to the name):

Alexander Beecroft, Secretary-Treasurer, American Comparative Literature Association, University of South Carolina Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, 1620 College Street, Rm. 813A, Columbia SC 29208

OTHER COMMITTEE MEMBER ADDRESSES WILL BE ADDED SHORTLY.

THE DEADLINE for nomination and submission of the dissertation is NOVEMBER 1st, 2013.

Previous Bernheimer winners:

• Lily Gurton-Wachter (University of California - Berkeley) for her dissertation "Keeping Watch: Wartime Attention and the Poetics of Alarm around 1800". (CITATION)
• Bishupal Limbu (Northwestern University) for his dissertation "Fiction, Theory, and Social Justice: Dispropriative Readings" (2011). (CITATION)
• Elizabeth Young (UC Berkley), for her dissertation, "The Mediated Muse: Catullan Lyricism and Roman Translation" (2010). (CITATION)
• Jonathan Brook Haley (University of California - Irvine) for his dissertation "Atomic Poetry: Materialist Rhythms in Lucretius, Du Bellay, and Mallarmé" (2009). (CITATION)
• Marisa Galvez (Stanford University), for her dissertation, "Medium as Genre: A Historical Phenomenology of the Medieval Songbook in the Occitan, German, and Castilian Traditions" (2008). (CITATION)
• 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).