About the Berkson Award
Dorothy Berkson, professor emerita of English, taught at Lewis & Clark College from 1981 until her retirement in 2004. She died in April 2007. Professor Berkson was a presenter in Lewis & Clark’s first Gender Studies Symposium. For the gender studies minor, she designed a course titled Gender and Aesthetic Expression, which she continued to teach for many years.
The Dorothy Berkson Writing Award recognizes written achievement (e.g., scholarly essays, research projects,creative non-fiction, fiction, poetry, or playwriting) focused on gender and authored by a senior. The award winner is honored at a reception that celebrates Professor Berkson’s contributions to Lewis & Clark College and the excellence of current students who study gender through scholarly analysis and written expression.
Submissions may come from any field of study as long as gender is central to the work. The author must be a graduating senior. Most often the work will be produced in the senior year, but outstanding work from one’s junior year will also be considered. Submissions (maximum 5,000 words) must be accompanied by a faculty recommendation that provides context for the work and speaks to its merits.
Winners
2023-24
- Lauren Caldwell “A Shroud Enveloped Her Form”: Incest, the Language of Family, and the Legibility of Power In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
- McKenna Jones Snakes’ Blood: Reclaiming the Dualistic View of the Archaic Medusa
2022-23
- Venus Edlin Lil Nas X and Dolly Parton: Genre Subversion as Queer Practice
- Jillian Jackson Can the Master's Linguistics Dismantle the Master's House? Zilia's Subversive Bilingualism in Letters of a Peruvian Woman
2021-22
- Eve March Maggots and Metamorphosis: "Becoming" in Louise Bourgeois' Self Portraiture
- Ashley O'Leary "Penetrating Nature's Hiding Places": Masculinist Scientific Ideas, Fatal Passions, and the Female Body in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein
2020-21
- Phoenix Bruner The Persistence and Impossibility of Queer Life: Representations of Queerness in Katherine Mansfield’s ‘At the Bay’
- Mie Kumin Свои/Чужие [Ours/Others]: Sexual Others of the Imaginary Elsewhere
2019-20
- Amaris Bouchard Howl Together: An Ethnography for my Grandmother
- Maura Phillips The Edges of Imagination: Women, Art, and Desire in Keats’s Late Romances
2018-19
- Madeleine Bentley 'Not just ‘like a love affair.' Tracing the personal in narratives of sexual arousal while breastfeeding
- Mira Glasser Queering the Self in Illness: Katherine Mansfields to Katherine Mansfields
2017-18
- Eva Gellman The Slipperiness of the Sublime in Eavan Boland’s “The Woman Who Turns Herself Into A Fish”
- Mikay Parsons Cultural Intelligibility and the Policing of Gender: The Tension Between Butler’s Theory of Performativity and Personal Experience
2016-17
- Erin Keoppen Wild Words, Space, Place and Gender in Tamil Feminist Poetry and Prose.
- Sully Pujol Beauty is Truth, Truth Art(ifice) Female Creative Agency in John Keats’s Isabella, Lamia, and The Eve of St. Agnes.
2015-16
- Angie Epifano A Veiled Revolution: The Photographs of Angèle Etoudi Essamba.
- Eve Goellner Problematizing “Strong”: Why the Strong Female Character is No Longer Enough.
2014-15
- Annabel Saliba Carroll The Roles of Illness in the Works of Virginia Woolf.
- Emma Post We Begin Our Tour of the Female Muse.
2013-14
- Laura Houlberg Exclusive Environments: Transmisogyny in U.S. Environmentalism.
- Gus Wolff A Kind of Love: A Decade of Camp and Me.
2012-13
- Eline Leemans Crafting Reproductive Rights Through Social Practice Art.
- Faolán Thompson Quiet Anxiety: Women, Domesticity, and Confinement.
2011-12
- Kemiyondo Coutinho Kawuna…You’re It.
- Kathryn Kucera A Case for the Radical Potential of a Cyborg Poet.
2010-11
- Rhiannon Troutman Transitions of Crisis: Building ‘Home’ for Transgender Youth Transitioning Out of Foster Care.
- Arielle White Redefining Cultural Citizenship to Escape Patriarchal Politics.
2009-10
- William Haines Fluidity: Gender, Bodily Fluids and the Grotesque Language of Alexander Pope.
- Maile Speakman No Hay Manera Apagar el Ocio (They Can’t Stop the Leisure): Queer and Countercultural Space in Contemporary Havana.
2008-09
- Kimberly Fanshier Bad Hour.
- Kacie Dalziel Long Live the King! Gender Performance and the Politics of Drag Kings.
