The Nicholson Center is delighted to announce the recipients of our annual competitions for outstanding work in British studies and related topics in the BA and MAPH programs. Congratulations to them all!

Nicholson BA Prize (2023)

Awarded for the best BA Thesis on a British Studies Topic

The 2023 recipient is Natalie (Nat) Nitsch, “‘For whom this boke was made’: Evidence for a Lay Readership of Þe Myrrour of Simple Soulis”

This thesis exemplifies how study of the material text stands to generate rich historical insights. Nitsch’s meticulous analysis of a late-medieval English manuscript adds to our knowledge of heresy in the later Middle Ages and the textual relations of English monastics, clerics, and laity. The author impressively combines primary and secondary sources to support her claims, moving by reasoned inferences from the physical manuscript to its broader spiritual and social implications. Judicious, with an impressive reach.

Natalie is a triple major in Classics, Religious Studies and Medieval Studies.

Nicholson-MAPH Thesis Prize (2023)

Awarded for the best MAPH Thesis on a British Studies Topic

WE HAVE JOINT WINNERS for the 2023 Nicholson-MAPH Thesis Prize!

Elisha Hamlin, “Cruel, Irreligious Piety”: Eucharistic Tropes and Witnessing Whiteness In Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus”

This thesis is striking for the way in which it takes something familiar – Shakespeare’s Titus and Andronicus – and shows it in a new light. Hamlin brings together the history of race and racialization with that of religious iconography, to show how the play’s remediation of images of sacrifice and ritual both instantiate and interrogate contemporary racial ideas. Particularly noteworthy is its identification of a distinctive literary archive to inform its analysis: the medieval mystery cycle plays, including both their ways of imagining the Eucharist, and their ways of imagining racial and religious difference. We congratulate Hamlin for the ambition and sophistication of this outstanding thesis.

Jenna Novosel, “Doctor and Disciple: Heterodoxic Science and Epistemological Optimism in Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan (1894)”

This superbly researched and well-argued thesis takes on the intriguing genre of the gothic tale in late 19th-century British literature, focusing on Arthur Machen’s “weird” fiction, The Great God Pan. The thesis is original for its development of a concept of “epistemological optimism”, which it persuasively identifies at work in Machen’s tale. Novosel’s thesis goes a long way to explaining the extraordinary popularity of a genre that otherwise seems so pessimistic and strange. Her writing is impressively crisp, engaging, and terminologically exact. This is an outstanding thesis that makes a genuine contribution to scholarship of the British fin-de-siècle.