2020
Lindsay Aldrich -- "Addressing LGBT Health Disparities", written for Mary Burke's Gender, Sexualities, and Medicine class, GSWS 195.
2019
Adelaide Szczesiul -- “Combatting Fragmentation, Fostering Citizenship: The Fight for LGBT Rights in American Public Schools. Written for Ellen Andersen’s LGBT Politics and History class, GSWS 105.
2018
Matthew Fioti -- A COUNTERFEIT
English 212: Capstone Seminar in Writing, Spring 2018 taught by Gregory Bottoms
2017
Rebecca Humphrey – “El pueblo unido jamás será vencido: Queer oppression in Francisco Franco’s Spain”, written for Paul Deslandes’ seminar “Queer Lives: LGBT History” fall 2016 semester.
Leon Bick – “Makeability | Breakability” written for Eve Alexandra’s “Introduction to Creative Writing” fall 2016 semester.
2016
Emy P. Takinami - “Feminized Asians and Masculinized Blacks: The Construction of Gendered Races in the United States," a thesis written for Paul Deslandes, department of history.
Pearl C. Weggler – “Preserving Herstory or Casting a Spell? How Radical Feminists Produced a Queer Fantasy Witch; An Analysis of Gyn/Ecology, Woman Hating, and Witches, Midwives, and Nurses”, written for Jean Bessette’s “Feminist History and Memory” fall 2015.
2015
The Daniel-McCarter Award was given to Mariel Brown-Fallon for her paper “The Development of Bisexuality: Meaning, Practice, and Identity." This essay was written in Paul Deslandes' seminar “Queer Lives: LGBT History” during the fall 2014 semester. In this insightful and sophisticated essay, Mariel traces the changing meanings of bisexuality over the course of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Relying on the works of Charles Darwin, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Sigmund Freud, and Alfred Kinsey, she illustrates the complex history of a concept. In so doing, she reminds us that categories of sexual identity indeed have a long and complicated history.
To honor the quality of submissions, the committee awarded honorable mention to Rocko Gieselman for their paper “Getting Off: The Rise of Lesbian-Produced Pornography and the Politics Behind It in the Mid- to Late-1980s” written for Paul Deslandes’s seminar “Queer Lives: LGBT History” and to Jess Fuller for her paper “A Queer Interpretation of the Gilmore Girls,” also written for Paul Deslandes’s seminar.
2014
Joshua MacGregor's paper, “Toward A (Queer) Urban Geography,” is the end product of research they did during their participation in the Comparative Women’s and Gender Studies in Europe education abroad program. The paper explores the way that sexualities are shaped in and through space and place and offers a comparative survey and analysis of LGBT spaces and queer sites of resistance in Berlin, Prague, and Krakow. Joshua’s work challenges us to think about how spaces can function in oppressive as well as liberatory ways and how spaces can be rethought, rewritten, and revised to create sites of resistance and liberation.