UCL FACULTY OF ARTS AND HUMANITIES

The following submissions were received this year, nominated by the following MA Boards of Examiners:  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:

• Bethany Marston, Poetry and Testimony:  Edith Bruck and Primo Levi
• Pascal Porcheron, The Avant-Garde Manifesto as Parody. Parodies of the Avant-Garde
• Raj Shah, Castles of the Counterfeit: Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Jules Verne’s Le Chateau des Carpathes in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
• Elisa Jochum, Police in Contemporary German Film: the Body, Trustworthiness and the Promise of Security
• Stuart Scott, Laying Bare: Meaning, Medium and Metaphor in Paul Morris’s Plantin’ Seed
• Emma Pressley, Translating Terrorism: Norway 22/7
• James Mackay, Ezra Pound and the Location of Sovereignty: a Spatial Analysis of ‘The Fifth Decad’, ‘The Pisan Cantos’ and ‘Thrones’

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The judges wish once again 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 continues to speak 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 cultural enquiry.

These criteria are interpreted in the broadest sense: excellence is interpreted as the ability to challenge critical boundaries.

After careful deliberation and in the light of the extremely high standard of work submitted, the panel unanimously decided to award this year’s Prize to Raj Shah for his dissertation, Castles of the Counterfeit: Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Jules Verne’s Le Château des Carpathes in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.