MA Student Wins Irish Association for American Studies (IAAS) Essay Prize

14 Aug 2015

Congratulations to the School's Ciarán Kavanagh, who is to be awarded the 2015 WTM Riches Essay Prize

The WTM Riches Prize is an annual prize, and was established in 2004 to recognise and reward high-quality work being done by younger scholars in many of the areas that are covered by the term “American Studies,” including history, politics, literature, film, geography, the visual arts, architecture, and cultural / critical theory.

In a particularly impressive field of essays, all of which were deemed by the judges to be excellent and thoroughly enjoyable, Ciarán’s essay, “Diagnosing Kurt Vonnegut: A Response to Susanne Vees-Gulani on the Subject of Slaughterhouse-Five”, was commended for its clear and strongly articulated argument. In particular, the judges noted its close reading alongside a subtle critique of the way in which psychiatric categories are applied to literary tropes.

The prize of €100 in book vouchers (as well as the chance to revise the essay for publication in the Irish Journal of American Studies) will be awarded at the IAAS Postgraduate Symposium, held at the Clinton Institute on the 28th November.

Ciarán is currently taking the School's MA in Modernities (American and British Literature and Film), and writing his dissertation about selected novels of Philip K. Dick. He is going to be starting a PhD with Dr Alan Gibbs in October, looking at narrative forms in postmodernism. We wish him every success with his research.

The full story is available on the IAAS website, here.