Previous competition essays
2025
Prizewinner:
- Carson Eckhard of St Edmund’s College for their essay, Beyond the Border of a Great Belonging: Biopower and Slavery’s Medical Afterlives Among Formerly Enslaved Women in Early National Philadelphia.
Highly Commended:
- Kim Abramson of Lucy Cavendish College, for linguistic awareness of how pidgin and creole languages continue to be marginalised: When a Name Betrays You.
- Peace Chisom Aniakor of Fitzwilliam College, who wrote on screen presentations of enslavement, domestic servitude and modern trafficking: I Am Not A Colour! White Supremacy, Blackness and African Resistance on Screen.
- Alexandra Bird of Corpus Christi College, for a critical account of a musical tradition whose dimensions have been underestimated: "Roll, Jordan, Roll": Flow, Spatiality and the Political Body in the Nineteenth Century African American Spiritual.
- Sydnae Taylor of Darwin College, whose study concerns the reality of ongoing enslavement legacies in contemporary obstetric care: Breeding Narratives: The Continuity of Colonial Violence in Black Jamaican Women.
- Emilia Warr of Selwyn College, who analysed the embodiment of enslavement and its partial resolution in Morrison’s famous novel: Embodiment, Trauma, and Healing: A Study of Hands and Feet in ‘Beloved’.
If you would like to read any of these essays, please contact the Prize Administrator at leprize@girton.cam.ac.uk in the first instance.