Winners of the Dr Greg Wells Undergraduate Essay Prizes, 2025
During July 2025 the CSR awarded for the eighth time, its Greg Wells Prizes for the best undergraduate intermediate-year and final-year essays and dissertation. Thanks again to all of those who nominated essays for the prize this year – once again, the standard was very high. Thanks also to our adjudicators, Drs. Stephen Bates, Ania Crowther, Stella Fletcher, Sofia Guthrie, Gloria Moorman and Iván Parga, to whom we are most grateful for giving their time. The winners were:
Intermediate year essay: Izzie French (English) for an essay entitled, 'How are ideas of ‘deception and the household’ presented in Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta and Anon.’s Arden of Faversham?' The adjudicators in this category said,
"The winning essay offers impressively contextual readings that are solidly grounded in a single discipline yet manage to please and surprise readers outside the student’s field of primary training: an accomplishment worth celebrating. Two plays that are not commonly considered together are here productively brought into conversation, and the results of this research are themselves organised in a rhetorically successful manner. Stimulating from its very first lines, this essay’s interdisciplinary appeal extends – smoothly and seemingly effortlessly – into visual and material culture when “A semantic field of commodity emerges” through a well-chosen example of “sensuous and visual imagery” (p. 2) arising out of the excellent and creative close-readings of the textual sources throughout this essay. It is to be hoped that this student might go on to do a dissertation in Renaissance Studies."
| Final year essay: Charlotte Hastie (English) for an essay entitled, 'How does the geographical setting of Arden of Faversham, affect its meaning?' The adjudicators in this category said, "This was an ambitious and erudite analysis of the anonymous Elizabethan play Arden of Faversham, focusing on its use of spatiality to draw some insightful conclusions. To understand the significance of the play’s geographical settings, the essay examines internal and international political tensions, integrating cultural geography, political and social history, cartography, and literary analysis. The student took inspiration from Julie Sanders' work on seventeenth-century drama; this was particularly apposite in the discussions on Kent's coastal situation (its vulnerability to invasion and its relation to trade with the rest of Europe), social mobility, and the symbolic imagining of appropriated monastic lands. The discussion was of a consistently high quality, but not always coherent, and not always lucid; the tendency to overuse scholarly idiom detracted from clarity at many points, and some grammatical errors needed eliminating. The essay was well-researched and the deployment of scholarship in support of the discussion was good, although there was room for greater critical engagement with the views referenced. The use of contemporary cartography (Ortelius’ Theatrum orbis terrarum) to examine Faversham’s geographical relevance within England and Europe as early modern audiences understood it was an appreciated methodological choice, as was the use of Thomas Southouse's Monasticon Favershamiense. Overall, this was a very fine effort to identify the play's geographical boundaries and to analyse them, and the result was an original and well-argued essay." |
| Final year dissertation: Milo Oldale (History of Art) for their work entitled, Original Imitation In the Origins Of European Porcelain: A Transcultural Reinterpretation of Medici Porcelain’. The adjudicators in the category said, "This dissertation was an informative and enjoyable read. The judges were very impressed with its original research and contribution to knowledge on the history of Medici porcelain, and we would encourage the author to consider publication. The illustrations were beautiful and helpful to building the case, though it might have been useful to position the figures next to the relevant paragraphs, if house formatting style permits. One or two typos do not detract from a well written, clear and engaging dissertation in which all of the information was pertinent to building the overall argument. The topic and scope were well chosen, allowing the author to provide a balance of contextual information, historical narrative and close detailed analysis. The work is a valuable contribution to material culture studies and has inspired the judges to learn more about porcelain making! Well done." |