Winners from the Class of 2014

Sam Hoagland, “Augustine’s and Shakespeare’s Thoughts on Justice”
Hoagland considers the possibility of justice on earth when he compares Augustine’s City of God to Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Through his nuanced comparison of Augustine’s city and Shakespeare’s island, he concludes that Augustine’s idealism prevents him from envisioning any kind of earthly justice “until the City of God had arrived” while Shakespeare’s realism allows him to imagine the possibility of earthly justice “through a balance of action and contemplation in one’s life.”

William Nelligan,“’The Father of the United Nations’: Cordell Hull, the Nobel Peace Prize, and the Quest for International Cooperation”
Nelligan analyzes the contributions of Secretary of State Cordell Hull and his role in establishing the United Nations in order to assess Hull’s contribution to world peace. Looking specifically at Hull’s “work against isolationist tariffs; . . . work to establish a relationship of collaboration between North and South American nations; and . . . his efforts toward the development of the United Nations,” Nelligan synthesizes a multitude of primary and secondary sources in order to argue that Hull is an “intriguing choice for the Nobel Peace Prize” given the “backdrop of terrible international strife” against which he labored.

Colin Tripp, “Gendering the Martyr”
Focusing on Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir Fun Home, Tripp examines the gendered image of the martyr, in particular “the martyrdom associated with family life,” that permeates the novel in the characters of the father Bruce and the mother Helen. In his deft analysis, Tripp argues that Bechdel goes beyond pitting the traditional masculine martyr against the maternal martyr and, instead, makes Helen “the embodiment of both masculine and maternal martyrs” in order to explore the arbitrariness of gender roles.