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Dr Greg Wells UG Essay Prize

The Dr Greg Wells Undergraduate Essay and Dissertation Prizes

The Centre for the Study of the Renaissance is pleased to confer the Dr Greg Wells prizes upon scholarly work of outstanding merit, quality and value in the field of Medieval and Renaissance Studies to undergraduates of the University of Warwick. The initiative for the prizes was taken thanks to a charitable donation to the Centre for the Study of the Renaissance by the late Dr Laurence Gregory (Greg) Wells (d. 2017), a former, mature MA and PhD student in the Faculty of Arts.

Three separate prizes will be awarded by the Centre to undergraduates of outstanding academic merit, based at the University of Warwick: one award will be at intermediate-year level, and one at final-year level, for an essay of between 2000 and 5000 words, on any subject within the broader scope of Medieval or Renaissance studies (£100 each). A third award is reserved for an undergraduate dissertation in the same field, the prize for this award being £150. The winners will be announced and certificates / prize money will either be presented in person during summer graduation ceremonies or sent out directly to individuals.

Conditions of entry  

The essay or dissertation must have been written in the current academic year by an undergraduate student enrolled at the University of Warwick. (Work written by Erasmus+ students enrolled for the full academic year also qualifies.) The essay or dissertation must be entered for the Prize in the original, unrevised state in which it was submitted to the candidate’s lecturer or tutor, or to a relevant electronic platform such as Tabula.

Submission must be made through the student’s personal tutor, course convenor, module tutor, or dissertation supervisor/coordinator. It is expected that tutors will put only the most promising essays or dissertations forward; each staff member can submit one entry per category.

Each entry requires a nomination statement, up to 300 words and from an academic member of staff, specifying the merit of the contribution being nominated; prose taken from the feedback forms is allowed. It should also be accompanied, whenever possible, by the original feedback form to the student, in order to aid our assessors in their deliberations. Nomination submission form HERE.

The essays and dissertations will be judged against the faculty-wide criteria for knowledge, argumentation and presentation or style, with special attention being paid to originality (either in approach or source material) and intellectual ambition or scope, and – where relevant – cross-disciplinary appeal.

The closing date for receipt of entries is Monday 17th June 2024