2019 Macaulay Prize Winner: Bethany E. Qualls
The Women’s Caucus is pleased to award this year’s Catherine Macaulay Prize for best graduate student paper on a feminist or gender studies subject to Bethany E. Qualls for her project, “Talking Statues, Treasonous Bishops, and Grave Robbery: Creating the Celebrated Sally Salisbury’s Print Afterlives”
Bethany E. Qualls is a PhD candidate, English Literature, UC Davis. Her dissertation title is “I am become so much the public talk”: Circulation, the Gossip Economy, and the Creation of Worth in Eighteenth-Century Print Culture." Qualls’ essay offers a new and fascinating perspective on the life of Sally Salisbury that pulls from known and previously unknown archival documents to uncover how Salisbury’s celebrity was manufactured through print media. In addition to providing a much-needed historical contextualization of Salisbury, Qualls’ essay also meticulously researches early eighteenth-century celebrity culture by relying on intertextual analysis of Salisbury’s image and commodification. The essay’s use of archival documents to trace Salisbury’s image, persona, and presentation displays how intertwined celebrity, culture, politics, and religion were in the period’s circulation of images and literary commodities. This essay is exceptionally written, and it contributes substantially to the growing fields of celebrity studies, print culture, and women’s history in the long eighteenth century.
Honorable Mention: Erin A. Spampinato, “The Origins of the Rape-As-Aberration Plot; or, was Samuel Richardson a Second Wave Feminist?”
Erin A. Spampinato is a PhD candidate, English Literature, The Graduate Center, CUNY. and a freelance writer and editor. Her dissertation explores representations of rape in eighteenth and nineteenth-century British novels
Spampinato’s essay offers a transformative view of rape studies that shifts definitions of normative and violent sexual encounters. The essay is remarkable for its breadth and far-reaching revision of the history of rape and moral condemnation, as separate but related to legal definitions. Spampinato’s essay locates dramatic changes in cultural, legal, and ethical understandings of rape in the eighteenth century using Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, offering a reconsideration of this canonical text as well as implications for how in our own time we understand the relationship between sex, violence, and desire.
The Women’s Caucus is pleased to award this year’s Catherine Macaulay Prize for best graduate student paper on a feminist or gender studies subject to Bethany E. Qualls for her project, “Talking Statues, Treasonous Bishops, and Grave Robbery: Creating the Celebrated Sally Salisbury’s Print Afterlives”
Bethany E. Qualls is a PhD candidate, English Literature, UC Davis. Her dissertation title is “I am become so much the public talk”: Circulation, the Gossip Economy, and the Creation of Worth in Eighteenth-Century Print Culture." Qualls’ essay offers a new and fascinating perspective on the life of Sally Salisbury that pulls from known and previously unknown archival documents to uncover how Salisbury’s celebrity was manufactured through print media. In addition to providing a much-needed historical contextualization of Salisbury, Qualls’ essay also meticulously researches early eighteenth-century celebrity culture by relying on intertextual analysis of Salisbury’s image and commodification. The essay’s use of archival documents to trace Salisbury’s image, persona, and presentation displays how intertwined celebrity, culture, politics, and religion were in the period’s circulation of images and literary commodities. This essay is exceptionally written, and it contributes substantially to the growing fields of celebrity studies, print culture, and women’s history in the long eighteenth century.
Honorable Mention: Erin A. Spampinato, “The Origins of the Rape-As-Aberration Plot; or, was Samuel Richardson a Second Wave Feminist?”
Erin A. Spampinato is a PhD candidate, English Literature, The Graduate Center, CUNY. and a freelance writer and editor. Her dissertation explores representations of rape in eighteenth and nineteenth-century British novels
Spampinato’s essay offers a transformative view of rape studies that shifts definitions of normative and violent sexual encounters. The essay is remarkable for its breadth and far-reaching revision of the history of rape and moral condemnation, as separate but related to legal definitions. Spampinato’s essay locates dramatic changes in cultural, legal, and ethical understandings of rape in the eighteenth century using Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, offering a reconsideration of this canonical text as well as implications for how in our own time we understand the relationship between sex, violence, and desire.
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The Catharine Macaulay Prize
Deadline for submission: September 1, 2019 The Catharine Macaulay Prize is an annual award made by the Women’s Caucus of ASECS for the best graduate student paper on a feminist or gender studies subject presented at the ASECS Annual Meeting or at any of the regional meetings during the academic year. In addition to special recognition, the prize carries a cash award of $500. To be eligible for the prize, papers must advance understanding of gender dynamics, women’s experience, and/or women's contributions to eighteenth-century culture, or offer a feminist analysis of any aspect of eighteenth-century culture and/or society. The paper you submit for the prize should be the one you presented at the conference without expansion or significant revision. Submissions for the Catharine Macaulay Prize must be sent directly to the ASECS office for consideration. SUNY Buffalo State College, 1300 Elmwood Avenue, Ketchum Hall 213, Buffalo, NY 14222; or as an email attachment (Word): asecsoffice@gmail.com). The winner of the prize will be notified soon after the committee has made its decision and will be announced at the following year’s annual meeting and the Women's Caucus luncheon. |
Past Winners
2018: Kate Ozment Honorable mention: Paris Spies-Gans 2017: 2016: Cassie Childs, "Eating Local: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's Italian Garden" 2015: Lauren Miskin, "Stitching Selfhood: Late Eighteenth-Century Samplers and the Crafting of British Femininity" 2014: Rachael Schaffner, "Matters of Imag(in)ed Memory and Happy Forgetting in Frances Burney's Camilla" 2013: Megan Hunt, "Women Without History" Honorable Mentions: Michael Nicholson, "A Singular Experiment" Arelene Leis, "Intellectual Collecting as Sociable Display" 2012: Glenda Goodman, “The Economy of Accomplishment: Aesthetics and Labor in Women’s Musical Lives” 2011: Kate Hamilton, “She ‘came up Stairs into the World’: Elizabeth Barry and Restoration Celebrity” 2010: Susan Muse, “From Femme Covert to Feme Overt: Public Justice in Eliza Haywood’s The Distress’d Orphan” and Edward Kozaczka, “Queer Gardens: Cultivating Desire in Penelope Aubin’s Lucinda" 2009: Julia H. Fawcett, "Charlotte Charke and the Over-Expression of Gender" 2008: Caroline Wigginton, "Faithful Translations: Reconsidering Coosaponakeesa's Acts of Interpretive Authorship on the Creek Frontier" 2007: Sonja Boon, "Does a Dutiful Wife Write, or, Should Suzanna Get Divorced? Reflections on Suzanne Cuchod Necker, Divorce, and the Construction of the Biological Subject" 2006: JoEllen DeLucia, "'Beyond the Narrow House': The Ossian Poems, Gender, and Empire" 2005: No prize given. 2004: Melissa Ganz, "Moll Flanders and English Marriage Law" 2003: Elizabeth Bennet, "Divergent Paths to Virtue in the Lives and Writings of Elizabeth Carter and Catherine Talbot" 2002: Andrew Piper, "Lost in Translation: German Women Translators around 1800" 2001: Jord/ana Rosenberg, "The Bosom of the Bourgeoisie" 2000: Anita de Freitas Boe, "'Neither Is It All Becoming': Edmund Burke's A Philosophic Enquiry, the Beautiful, and the Disciplining of Desire" 1999: Theresa Ann Smith, "The Proposal for a Female National Dress in Eighteenth-Century Spain" 1998: Lisa Zunshine: "'What door would it open to scandal...': Female Philanthropy and the London Foundling Hospitals" 1997: Elizabeth Child, "Geography, Gender, and Print Culture: [Re]Locating England's Provincial Women Writers" 1996: Mary Catherine Moran, "Eighteenth-Century Conduct Literature and Scottish Conjectural History on the Role of Women in the Progress of Mankind" 1995: Melissa Hyde, "Ambiguities of Gender Identity in François Boucher's Pastoral Paintings" 1994: Rebecca Messbarger, "Masked Resistance: A Woman's Defense of Women's Education in Eighteenth-Century Italy" 1993: Alessa Johns, "Engendering Utopias: Examples from Mid-Eighteenth-Century England" 1992: Charlotte Sussman, "Consuming Anxieties: Women and the Politics of Sugar, 1792" |
