The Nicholson Center is proud to announce that Caroline Funk has received the 2024 Nicholson-MAPH Thesis Prize for her project “Capital, Patriarchy, and Kinship: The Epitemological Evolution from Marital Risk to Communal Redemption in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda.” The jury for the prize, Professors Julie Orlemanski and Fredrik Albritton Jonsson, said the following:

Caroline Funk’s “Capital, Patriarchy, and Kinship: The Epistemological Evolution from Marital Risk to Communal Redemption in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda” is a remarkably lucid thesis. It delineates a focused argument that gradually builds to wider implications and elegantly signals its scholarly contributions. Its double analysis of nineteenth-century capitalism and patriarchy is persuasive, and its close-readings of individual passages are especially illuminating. Funk makes excellent use of the work of Ian Baucom and Carol Pateman to explore the language of subordination in Daniel Deronda. The thesis’s final turn to “a more radical perspective” is an exciting revelation of the full possibilities of the argument. We are excited to award it this year’s Nicholson Center MA Thesis Prize.