2016-17 Macaulay Prize Winner:
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 Cassie Childs, PhD
The selection committee has chosen Cassie Childs’s paper, “Eating Local: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Italian Garden,” as the winner of the 2016-2017 Catherine Macaulay Prize for best graduate student paper on a feminist or gender studies subject. We congratulate Childs for the nuance and sensitivity with which she explores a neglected section of the correspondence of this important eighteenth-century woman writer. What stood out most for us in this piece was the use of food, and materiality more generally, as an access point for thinking about female travelers and their identities. We especially appreciated Childs’s use of “critical food moments” as an original and useful approach to exploring eighteenth-century texts. The committee members were also impressed by the treatment of old age in this essay; as one member commented: “It was a poignant moment in the essay to realize that gardening replaced reading and writing as Lady Mary’s eyesight failed.” Childs ends her essay with a quotation by Lady Mary that bears repeating here: “It was formerly a terrifying view to me that I should one day be an Old Woman; I now find that Nature has provided pleasures for every State.”
Prize committee: Mary McAlpin, Elizabeth Neiman, and Catherine Ingrassia
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 Cassie Childs, PhD
The selection committee has chosen Cassie Childs’s paper, “Eating Local: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Italian Garden,” as the winner of the 2016-2017 Catherine Macaulay Prize for best graduate student paper on a feminist or gender studies subject. We congratulate Childs for the nuance and sensitivity with which she explores a neglected section of the correspondence of this important eighteenth-century woman writer. What stood out most for us in this piece was the use of food, and materiality more generally, as an access point for thinking about female travelers and their identities. We especially appreciated Childs’s use of “critical food moments” as an original and useful approach to exploring eighteenth-century texts. The committee members were also impressed by the treatment of old age in this essay; as one member commented: “It was a poignant moment in the essay to realize that gardening replaced reading and writing as Lady Mary’s eyesight failed.” Childs ends her essay with a quotation by Lady Mary that bears repeating here: “It was formerly a terrifying view to me that I should one day be an Old Woman; I now find that Nature has provided pleasures for every State.”
Prize committee: Mary McAlpin, Elizabeth Neiman, and Catherine Ingrassia
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The Catharine Macaulay Prize
Deadline for submission: September 1, 2018 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'scontributions 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. PO Box 7867, Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, NC 27109; or as an email attachment (Word): asecs@wfu.edu). 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
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" |
