The Charles Bernheimer Prize Citations 2012
2012 Prize Winner:
This year's Bernheimer Prize Award for Best Dissertation by a Graduate Student in Comparative Literature goes to Lily Gurton-Wachter of the University of California - Berkeley, for her dissertation, "Keeping Watch: Wartime Attention and the Poetics of Alarm around 1800."
Lily Gurton-Wachter’s dissertation, “Keeping Watch: Wartime Attention and the Poetics of Alarm around 1800,” is an elegantly written and well argued comparative work that displays textual, contextual and archival skills and an effective use of theory, method and practice in its identification in British Romanticism of “a poetics of heightened attention inseparable from wartime vigilance.” The dissertation shows a fine range in examining a poetics that is critical of the political alarmism of the Romantic era in the context of wartime experience and of an intersection of history, ethics, and aesthetics. This study also suggests in the twenty first century an afterlife for the wartime poetics of attention in Romanticism.
2012 Bernheimer Prize Committee:
Sangeeta Ray, University of Maryland (Chair)
Jonathan Hart, University of Alberta
Branka Arsic, SUNY-Albany
This year's Bernheimer Prize Award for Best Dissertation by a Graduate Student in Comparative Literature goes to Lily Gurton-Wachter of the University of California - Berkeley, for her dissertation, "Keeping Watch: Wartime Attention and the Poetics of Alarm around 1800."
Lily Gurton-Wachter’s dissertation, “Keeping Watch: Wartime Attention and the Poetics of Alarm around 1800,” is an elegantly written and well argued comparative work that displays textual, contextual and archival skills and an effective use of theory, method and practice in its identification in British Romanticism of “a poetics of heightened attention inseparable from wartime vigilance.” The dissertation shows a fine range in examining a poetics that is critical of the political alarmism of the Romantic era in the context of wartime experience and of an intersection of history, ethics, and aesthetics. This study also suggests in the twenty first century an afterlife for the wartime poetics of attention in Romanticism.
2012 Bernheimer Prize Committee:
Sangeeta Ray, University of Maryland (Chair)
Jonathan Hart, University of Alberta
Branka Arsic, SUNY-Albany