Previous Paper Prize WinnersGraduate Student Paper PrizeThe MMLA congratulates the 2024 winner of the Graduate Student Paper Prize: Anika Jensen. Anika's paper, "‘The War is the World’: Theories of Feeling in Women’s Great War Nursing Narratives," applies an affective lens to two texts produced by female relief workers operating out of the same field hospital in France and Flanders during the First World War. She identifies what Sianne Ngai calls "ugly feelings" in both texts—The Backwash of War by Ellen La Motte and The Forbidden Zone by Mary Borden—and considers the social and political ramifications of these feelings, especially as they confront unsustainable expectations of "appropriate" feelings for women during war. Ultimately, she argues that while both authors highlighted different predominant feelings to different ends, both prioritized their felt experiences as essential tools in telling the truth about war. Moreover, she advocates for affect as an essential tool in understanding women's war experiences. The MMLA's Executive Committee states, "Jensen's paper reveals a greater truth behind historical World War I trauma, both seen and unseen, through critical attention to affective dimensions of women’s narratives, inviting a new perspective on this body of work." Anika is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Kentucky. Her dissertation, "Feeling and Experience in American Women's Writing from the First World War," approaches women's First World War narratives through the lens of affect, seeking to uncover their felt experiences with war work and the impacts of such felt experiences on social and political activism. She has articles forthcoming in Tolkien Studies, The Cambridge History of War and Society in America, and War, Literature, and the Arts. She holds an MA from the University of South Alabama and a BA from Gettysburg College.
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Undergraduate Student Paper PrizeThe MMLA congratulates the 2025 winner of the Undergraduate Student Paper Prize: Isabella Martin. Her paper, “Immoral Art: Gender and Pre-Raphaelite Artwork in The Picture of Dorian Gray” investigates the relationship between Wilde’s novel and artwork by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a popular – and controversial – group of artists whom Wilde publicly supported in his early career. The novel’s titular character is described in ways which resemble young men who populate Pre-Raphaelite paintings, such as the Angel Gabriel, Narcissus, and Eros. Dorian Gray is also described with and surrounded by floral imagery, which provides significant weight to his gender coding. Utilizing these painted images, alongside material by prolific contemporary writers such as Sir Alfred Lord Tennyson and John Ruskin, this paper demonstrates that the young Dorian Gray transgresses significantly from Victorian constructions of masculinity, instead occupying a space of gender ambiguity. Dorain Gray’s liminality exhibits how both Wilde and the Brotherhood used beauty as a form of rebellion, questioning the rigid structures of gender within the period, and ultimately informing our own perceptions of identity and expression. Previous Winners
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