CLST is pleased to announce the two winners of this year's Eric O. Clarke Dissertation Prize: Jordan Bernsmeier, "Aluminum Lesbians: Recycling Lesbian Legacy in Classical Hollywood," and Brittney Knotts, “Labor, Play, and Futurity of the Twenty-First Century Girl Coder."
They will be joining the ranks of a line of distinguished winners now stretching back nearly a decade, the last awardee of which was Maria Lis Baiocchi in 2020 for her “A Law of One’s Own: Newfound Labor Rights, Household Workers’ Agency, and Activist Praxis in Buenos Aires, Argentina.”
Administered jointly by the Department of English and the Graduate Program for Cultural Studies, the annual Eric O. Clarke Dissertation Prize recognizes graduate students whose dissertations are of high quality in the fields of LGBTQ studies, queer theory, feminist studies and theory, philosophy, and/or comparative literature. The prize is given in memory of Dr. Clarke, who was a beloved faculty member in the English Department and the Cultural Studies program from 1992 until his untimely death in 2010. Eric was a widely respected and innovative scholar of nineteenth-century British literary studies and sexuality studies.