UCL FACULTY OF ARTS AND HUMANITIES

For this year’s inaugural prize, a dissertation was nominated by each of the examiners’ boards for 2010-11 of the following MAs: Centre for European Studies, Comparative Literature, Film Studies, Gender Society and Representation, Language Culture and History, Issues in Modern Culture, Translation Studies.

The nominations were as follows:

• Ken Cheng, How and Why Was Berlin Dada More Communist Than Dada?
• Xuyan Shen, On Music in Samuel Beckett
• Alexander Graham, Immersion in Time: History and Memory and the Question of Readability in the Films of Aleksei German
• Elizabeth Cameron, The Global Politics of Family Planning: Loss of a Rights Based Approach?
• Barbara Pycinska-Taylor, The Poetics of Ekphrasis and Pictorialism in Guido Gozzano
• Harriet Wragg, Footprints on the Ceiling: the function of the intertitle in the silent film era
• Hannah Kitchener, A Translation of Extracts from La Princesse de Clèves by Madame de Lafayette, with an introduction and translator's notes

The assessors wish to emphasize that they found all the dissertations to be of extremely high quality. Each dissertation explored distinctive, engaging, and frequently original critical perspectives.

Taken as a whole, the panel believes the level of work speaks very highly indeed of the quality of the taught graduate environment in literary and cultural studies at UCL. To be nominated for the prize in itself represents a considerable achievement, and the panel would like to congratulate each and every student whose dissertation was nominated.

This prize aims to reward comparative critical study as well as critical excellence in the field of literary and cultural study. These criteria are interpreted in the broadest sense: excellence is interpreted as challenging critical boundaries.

After careful deliberation and in the light of the extremely high standard of work submitted this year, the panel unanimously decided to make two awards for the FIGS MA Dissertation Prize:

• 1^st place, with an ward of £150:

Alexander Graham, Immersion in Time: History and Memory and the Question of Readability in the Films of Aleksei German

• 2^nd place, with an award of £50:

Xuyan Shen, On Music in Samuel Beckett

.

Stephanie Bird, A&H Faculty Graduate Tutor

Stephen Hart, Director of Research, SELCS

Timothy Mathews, chair and founder of the Prize