Edith Wharton Society Award Recipients
Undergraduate Research Awards2023 Award Recipients
The Elsa Nettels Prize for a Beginning ScholarIlene Kalish, Independent Scholar/ New York University Press
“The Final Termination: A New Chronology of Edith Wharton’s Engagement to Harry Stevens”
The Award for Archival Research
Laetitia Nebot-Deneuville, Dublin City University
“Early-Twentieth-Century Anglo-American literary tourism in Northern Italy and Wharton’s
Glimpses of the Moon”
The Undergraduate Research Prize
Allegra Walker, Columbia University
“Groping for God: Elusive Spirituality in House of Mirth and Summer.”
2022 Award Recipients
The Award for Archival Research
Anna Girling, University of Edinburgh
“Edith Wharton and the Cold War”
The Elsa Nettels Prize for a Beginning Scholar
No award given.
The Undergraduate Research Prize
No award given.
2021 Award Recipients
The Elsa Nettels Prize for a Beginning Scholar Emma Aylor, Texas Tech University “’Nay, rather, Lord, between’: The Unification of Body and Spirit in Wharton’s Deathbed Monologues” The Award for Archival Research Lina Geriguis, Cabrillo College “Wharton, Equity, and Editorial Decisions: Authorial Agency in Shaping the Disability Discourse in the Rare Editions of Ethan Frome” The Undergraduate Research Prize Alp Eren Pirli, Boğaziçi University “Telegraphic Naturalism: Technological Determinism in The Reef” I’m pleased that we had robust submissions this year, and I wish to extend many thanks to the Awards committees for their careful and thoughtful work: for the Elsa Nettels Prize: Myrto Drizou, Donna Campbell, and Laura Rattray; for the Award for Archival Research: Melanie Dawson, Sheila Liming, and Meg Toth; and for the Undergraduate Research Prize: Jay Jessee and Virginia Ricard. 2020: No award competition except for the Undergraduate Research Awards (at link) due to the pandemic.2019 Prizes
The Archival Research Award Rachel Walerstein, University of Iowa, for research relating to her dissertation,Masculine Gestures: Imitation and Initiation in American Modernism. The Elsa Nettels Award for a Beginning Scholar Hannah Champion, Université Bordeaux Montaigne, for “’Hold me, Gerty, hold me’: The ‘Lesbianism’ of Lily Bart.” Undergraduate Essay Award (co-winners) Samuel McIntyre, William & Mary, for “Charity Case: The Gendered Economy of Gift-Giving in Summer.” Katie Williams, William & Mary, for “Object or Owner: Navigating Identity through the Aesthetic in Wharton’s Fiction.”2018
2018 Elsa Nettels Prize for a Beginning Scholar Katherine Burd, Georgetown University. “Dangerous Dispossession: Amputation, Bad Atmospheres, and Environmental ‘Slow Violence’ in The Spoils of Poynton and The House of Mirth” 2018 Edith Wharton Undergraduate Research Prize Emma Pierce, University of California, Irvine, for “The Stairs Not Taken: Domestic Space, Gender Roles, and Power in The House of Mirth”2017
2017 Elsa Nettels Prize for a Beginning Scholar Deborah Molloy, University of Kent, for “In the Cave of the Oracle: Feminine Tragedy in The House of Mirth and Mrs Manstey’s View.” 2017 Edith Wharton Society Award for Archival Research Isabelle Parsons, The Open University 2017 Edith Wharton Undergraduate Research Prize Aidan Selmer, College of William and Mary, for “Risk and the Self-Fashioning Women in Wharton’s House of Mirth, Ethan Frome, and Summer.” 2017 Edith Wharton Society Award for Archival Research Myrto Drizou, Valdosta University2016
2015
2015 Essay Prize Recipients
2015 Edith Wharton Society Beginning Scholar Prize Girling, Anna. “‘Agrope among Alien Forces’: Alchemical Transformations and Capitalist Transactions in Edith Wharton’s the Touchstone.” Edith Wharton Review 31.1-2 (2015): 74-87. Print.
2015 Undergraduate Essay Prize Winner Brittany Barron, Lily Bart’s “Process of Crystallization” Changing Brier Rose’s Fate in The House of Mirth2014
2014 Essay Prize Recipients No award
2014 Undergraduate Essay Prize Winners Angela Sammarone, for “Edith Wharton and Race: Tracing Race throughout The Custom in the Country” Lindsay Wrinn, for “The Custom of the Country: Male Hysteria, Virginity Loss, and Patriarchal Upheaval at the Turn of the Century”2013
2013 Essay Prize Recipients Both essays will be published in the EWR, vol 29.2: First prize: Krystyna Michael (PhD candidate, CUNY-Grad Center), for “A Break in the Continuity:” Chaos, Control and Wharton’s Commitment to Form.” Second prize: Katelyn Durkin (PhD candidate, UVa), for “The (Re)Production Craze: Taylorism and Regress in Edith Wharton’s Twilight Sleep.” 2013 Beinecke Award Gary Totten, Professor of English, North Dakota State University: “Wharton’s Wild West: Undine Spragg, Medora de Mores, and Dakota Divorce Culture” 2013 The Mount Award Sheila Liming, Ph D candidate, English, Carnegie Mellon University: “Edith Wharton and Modern Economies of Book Ownership”2012
2012 Essay Prize Recipients
2012 Beinecke Wharton Collection Award: Melanie Dawson, College of William and Mary, “Ageist Modernity: Generational Obsessions in the Work of Edith Wharton and Her Contemporaries”
Dawson will examine Wharton’s letters and drafts of her later fiction for clues to the ways in which her sense of age, beauty, and women’s cultural position were bound up in one another and the ways in which her understanding of these issues may have changed over time and across manuscript revisions.
2012 Mount Research Award: Kaye Wierzbicki, Harvard University, “‘Thinking Away the Flowers’: Edith Wharton and a Return to Form.”
In addition to the Mount’s physical gardens,Wierzbicki will examine Wharton’s annotations and markings in scientific and evolutionary texts and the extensive collection of horticultural and landscape design texts in her library, spanning subjects from arboriculture to irises and from Italian Renaissance gardens to Japanese rock gardens. Wierzbicki will consider Wharton’s thinking about the relationship between text and garden and between garden and nation.
Noreen O’Connor