Prizes & Fellowships

Woodberry Prize

The Departments of History and English offer the Woodberry Prize, named in honor of George Edward Woodberry (1855-1930), the first English professor at the University of Nebraska and the first professor at the University to offer courses in History. The prize is awarded annually to the best seminar paper on any interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century subject, and is open to graduate students from any University of Nebraska-Lincoln program.

Prize Winners

  • 2020
    Winner: Jaclyn Swiderski (English): “ ‘Mysterious Nature’s hermit child’: Representations of Deafness in Lydia Sigourney and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps”
    Honorable Mention: Patrick Hoehne (History): “Rereading the Riot Acts: Race, Labor, Law, and the Snow Riots of 1835”
  • 2018
    Shawn Ratcliff (Sociology): “Back to Africa: Liberia, Perceptions of Race, and Diplomacy”
    Jessica Tebo (English): “Dialogism in the Accounts of Nineteenth-Century Armchair Explorers”
  • 2011
    Kathryn Kruger (English): “‘Softened with Time’: Timekeeping and Temporal Anxiety in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
  • 2010
    Jennie Case (English): “'A Crushing Anticipation of Calamity': Toward an Environmental Apocalypticism of the Gothic”
  • 2009
    Trey Conaster (English): “To Be(Head) a Family: Marie Antoinette in 1790's British Poetry”
    Kurt Knecht (Music): “'That Book by the Christian Enamoured of Aesthetics': The Musicological Misunderstanding of Kierkegaard's Don Giovanni Essay”
  • 2008
    Vanessa Steinroetter (English): “White Anxieties - Slave Insurrections in Nineteenth-Century America, the Indian Rebellion of 1857, and Discourses of Nation, Race, and Masculinity”
  • 2007
    No Award
  • 2006
    Sabrina Ehmke (English): “At Home in America: The Effect of Native American Boarding Schools on Indian Families in Victorian America”
    Kim McVey (History): “'Weary and Broken, Old Age': Old Age and Grandparents in Victorian America”
  • 2005
    Cindy Stuloeff (English): “Tokens of Esteem: The Rise and Fall of Literary Annuals in the Mid-Nineteenth Century”

Pulos Fellowship

The English Department offers the Christos Pulos Fellowship in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, renewable for up to three years.