Skip to Content

The Horst Frenz Prize Citations 2008 HM

2008 Honorable Mention:

Kyla Schuller (University of California - San Diego), for her paper, "The Fossil and the Photograph: Capturing the 'Primitive' in the Museum and Boarding School," presented at the 2007 Annual Meeting in Puebla, Mexico.

Her paper, "The Fossil and the Photograph: Capturing the 'Primitive' in the Museum and Boarding School," impressed the judges as a provocative, even shocking exposé of the sentimental uses to which social Darwinism was put in the study of natural history in Nineteenth-Century U. S culture. Schuller argues cogently that the notion of evolution was turned into a theory of narrative that "naturalized" the U. S. conquest of the West.

Kyla Schuller's paper was nominated by Professor Jina Kim, of Northwestern University, and the judges for the competition were: Professor Eugene Eoyang (Convenor), of Lingnan University (Hong Kong) and Indiana University; Professor Virginia Jackson of Tufts University; and Professor Pericles Lewis of Yale University. The American Comparative Literature Association takes pride in making this award to Kyla Schuller, and congratulates her on her outstanding achievement.

2008 Frenz Prize Committee:
Eugene Eoyang, Lingnan University and Indiana University (Chair)
Virginia Jackson, Tufts University
Pericles Lewis, Yale University