Senior Projects Awards and Presentation
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Senior Projects in Literature 2026
Senior Projects in Literature 2026
SABRINA VIOLET ALIOTO
Literature: “Abusers, Victims, and the Representation of Suffering in Lolita (1955) and A Little Life (2015)”
Project Adviser: Adhaar Desai
RUTH ALMA BOUMBOUME
Literature: “Graphic Parallax: Negotiating Perspective in Flannery O’Connor’s ‘The Life You Save May Be Your Own’”
Project Adviser: Jaime Alves
FAITH JOANN CARLE
Literature: “Conversation with the Nonhuman”
Concentration: Gender and Sexuality Studies
Project Adviser: Alex Benson
CELESTE NOELLE CONNELL
Classical Studies and Literature: “Genre and Self-Fashioning in Three Poems of Exile: Sophocles’s Philoctetes, Ovid’s Tristia, and Dante’s Paradiso”
Second Focus: Italian Studies
Project Advisers: Lauren Curtis and Joseph Luzzi
MAYA TANORY CONNELL
Literature: “The Case Report in Victorian Short Stories: Narrative and Pseudoscience in Poe and Le Fanu”
Concentration: Victorian Studies
Project Adviser: Daniel Williams
MAIIA DAVYDOVA
Literature: “Anchoring the Self: Nina Berberova’s Archival and Autobiographical Self-Fashioning”
Project Adviser: Olga Voronina
OWEN CHRISTOPHER DENKER
Literature: “Workers in Fiction: Estrangement and Chasing the American Dream in the Post-World War II Service Economy”
Project Adviser: Alys Moody
MATTHEW LEONARD DESROCHERS
Literature: “The Dickinsons’ Testament to Education”
Project Adviser: Alex Benson
OCTAVIA CHARLOTTE DONALDSON
Literature: “Lifting the Veil: Towards a Transpersonal Praxis of Daughterhood in the Life-Writing of Annie Ernaux”
Project Adviser: Éric Trudel
GWYN MAE DOWNEY
Literature and Middle Eastern Studies: “Adab (أدب (Reimagined: Literary Form and Confinement in Arabic Literature”
Project Advisers: Daniel Williams and Ziad Dallal
GRACE ELIZABETH HILL
Literature: “Talking About Talking About Race: Dialogue in African American Literature and Literary Criticism”
Project Adviser: Adhaar Desai
NATALIE LYNN JOHNSON
Literature: “Censorship and Academic Freedom in the Texas Public Education System”
Project Adviser: Elizabeth Frank
JOANNE MIJIN LEE
Literature: “Monstrous Metamorphosis in Literature”
Project Adviser: Lauren Curtis
DAVID NICHOLLS
Literature: “Frustrated Subjects: The ‘Plasticity Myth’ in Three Contemporary Novels”
Project Adviser: Chiara Pavone
ALIYAH CARIDAD OLIVEIRA
Literature and Music: “The (True) Thesis of a Fangirl: Archetypical Storytelling in Boy Bands, Culture, and the Literary Space of Popular Music”
Project Advisers: Franz Nicolay and James Bagwell
PEYTON ELIZABETH PARKER
Literature: “The Flesh of the World: Phenomenological Methodology in the Novels of Virginia Woolf and Samuel Beckett”
Project Adviser: Alys Moody
SAFFRON RAIN SHARIFI
Literature: “Singing the Bones”
Project Adviser: Elizabeth Holt
AVA LUCÍA VILLEGAS
Literature: “Female Archetypes in Mexican Literature Through the Eyes of Rosario Castellanos and Laura Esquivel: la Malinche and la Virgen de Guadalupe”
Concentration: Latin American and Iberian Studies
Second Focus: Spanish Studies
Project Adviser: Nicole Caso
VIRGINIA CROMELIN WILLIAMS
Literature and Philosophy: “Order and the Possibility of Judgement: T. S. Eliot’s Structures of Poetry and Criticism”
Project Advisers: Matthew Mutter and Ruth Zisman
JESSICA PATRICIA ZOLL
Literature: “Anne of Green Gables, an Elastic Bildungsroman Series”
Concentration: Victorian Studies
Project Adviser: Daniel Williams -
Senior Awards and Prizes 2026
Senior Awards and Prizes 2026
Spadaccia Family Scholarship in Literature
An endowed scholarship established by the Spadaccia family and awarded to an outstanding Upper College student who has moderated in literature
Virginia Williams
Mark Purlia ’71 Memorial Scholarship
A scholarship given by the parents of Mark Purlia ’71, in his name and memory, and awarded annually to a student who, in the judgment of the Division of Languages and Literature, best fulfills conditions of ability and character
Anna Heath
William Frauenfelder Award
An award established in honor of William Frauenfelder, beloved professor of modern languages and literature for more than 30 years, and given to a student excelling in the study of one or more foreign languages
Garrett Collins
William Frauenfelder Translation Prize
A prize established in honor of William Frauenfelder, professor of modern languages and literature from 1934 to 1957 and 1969 to 1977, and awarded to a senior whose project includes a substantial work of literary translation of particularly high quality and attention to scholarship
Ezra Calderon, Colin Terrien
Margaret and John Bard Scholars Prize
Honorary prizes awarded annually by the faculty of each division of the College for outstanding academic achievement in the field of major interest
Languages and Literature
Maya Parker and Peyton PArker
Bill Sanders ’90 Memorial Prize
A prize given in memory of Bill Sanders ’90 to a student for appreciative, elegant, and insightful critical writing in English literature
Maya Davydova
Robert Rockman Prize
A prize established by the Class of 1966 to honor and acknowledge Robert Rockman, a beloved teacher devoted to making the Bard experience come to life for more than 40 years, and awarded to a junior or senior for excellence in literature and theater.
Elwyn Jacob
William Weaver Prize in Music and Languages
The renowned translator and authority on opera, William Weaver, a distinguished member of the Bard faculty, devoted his career as writer and teacher to exploring the links between language, music, and the visual arts. This prize is awarded to a senior Conservatory student whose work is in the spirit of William Weaver.
Anthony D'Amore
Wilton Moore Lockwood Prize
Established in 1927 by Mr. Wilton Moore Lockwood, a prize awarded to students who have submitted particularly distinguished creative and critical writing in coursework.
Peter Fields (critical), Annaliese Simons (creative)
Irma Brandeis Prize
A prize given annually to a third-year student or students with an excellent academic record, whose Senior Project in literature, languages, history, art history, philosophy, or the history of science is outstanding for both broadness of vision and precision of thought. The prize honors Bard’s distinguished, longtime faculty member Irma Brandeis, whose contributions to Dante scholarship and to Bard College exemplify the virtues embodied in this prize.
Anna Heath and Brigid Traub
The Mary McCarthy Award
The Mary McCarthy Award is given in recognition of engagement in the public sphere by an intellectual, artist, or writer. Mary McCarthy taught at Bard from 1946 to 1947 and again in the 1980s. The award honors the combination of political and cultural commitment exemplified by this fearless, eloquent writer and teacher.
Marilynne Robinson
R. Cole Heinowitz Prize in Literature
A prize in honor of R. Cole Heinowitz, a beloved, magnetic professor of literature from 2004 to 2025, whose scholarship
and pedagogy were characterized by an uncommon perceptiveness and a sense of intellectual rigor inflected with poetic
experimentation. Awarded annually for the Senior Project that best embodies the spirit of her work.
Peyton Parker