Daniel Heffernan and Ellis Light co-win Graduate Essay Prize

Daniel Heffernan and Ellis Light were named co-winners of the 2020 Graduate Essay Prize in May. The essays are selected by a committee of English faculty members and each year a prize of $150 is awarded to the best scholarly essay written by an English graduate student. The department first introduced this prize eight years ago as an initiative to recognize and celebrate students’ work. The submissions are judged anonymously, in a manner similar to the “blind review” process at most scholarly journals.

Heffernan was awarded the prize for “Rupturing Cold War Containment: Frank O'Hara and Vladimir Mayakovsky During the Red and Lavender Scare.” In his essay, Heffernan challenges the notion that Frank O'Hara was a politically disinterested aesthete by tracing the numerous allusions and references to Vladimir Mayakovsky in O'Hara's oeuvre. He argues that these invocations are a deliberate provocation of Cold War containment culture, which was fostered by the State Department and which cast both homosexuals and communists as dire threats to national security. In writing love poems to the Soviet Union's premier poet, O'Hara transforms poetry into a vehicle for imagining a synthesis between both queer and politically revolutionary desire.

Daniel Heffernan

“For the time being,” says Heffernan, “it is my hope to have the essay published as an article. There is a long section documenting the numerous intersections of the Red and the Lavender Scare, wherein communists were frequently accused of being homosexuals and homosexuals communists. The history is just so fascinating and horrific it's hard not to get lost in it.” He says the essay is part of his broader work towards a dissertation on the New York School and the Cold War. 

Light’s winning submission was “Trans/Mystical: The Euphoria of Blood, Milk, and Sweat in Julian of Norwich’s Revelation.” Their essay puts transgender experiences and narratives of “becoming” in dialogue with Julian of Norwich’s Revelations, a fourteenth-century text documenting its author’s mystical visions of Christ and the Passion. They argue that the ways that Julian describes bodily fluids–blood, milk, and sweat–call attention to gender transformation, performance, and nonbinary embodiment, and resonate with modern-day trans experiences. 

Ellis Light

“On a broader scale,” Light says, “this work advocates for medieval studies to embrace gender-expansive possibilities in readings of mystical texts.” Since winning the Graduate Essay Prize, they have also presented a version of this paper at the Mysticism & Lived Experience Network’s Inaugural Webinar.

With regards to Light and Heffernan co-winning the prize this year, John Bugg, Director of Graduate Studies, says, “usually, and especially in recent years, we have had too many excellent papers to settle on just one--the entries are amazing.”