The Bascom Headen Palmer Literary Prize is awarded annually to the best senior honors thesis in literary study across the university. One of Duke's highest undergraduate honors in the humanities, it was established to honor Judge Bascom Headen Palmer, an early alumnus of Trinity College who graduated in 1875. During his time at Trinity, Palmer won the Hesperian Literary Society's Medal, establishing a lifelong legacy of celebrating exceptional literary and critical insight.
Selection Process
The Bascom Headen Palmer Literary Prize is a department-nominated award open to any undergraduate who completes an outstanding critical honors thesis focused on literature. Faculty members should send nominations to the Director of Undergraduate Studies in their respective departments, and the DUS will decide which thesis to forward to the Bascom administrators to represent their department. A committee of judges will be drawn from departments eligible for the award. Usually, relevant departments and programs are African & African American Studies, Asian & Middle Eastern Studies, Classical Studies, English, German Studies, Philosophy, Program in Literature, Romance Studies, Slavic & Eurasian Studies and Theater Studies. But any department may nominate a thesis that is substantially focused on a literary subject.
Faculty will be asked to submit nominations for the Bascom each year in early April. Students cannot apply directly. Awardees are selected strictly on the merit of their theses’ critical strengths and contributions to literary scholarship.
Previous Award Winners
2026: "Reading Choice in Simone de Beauvoir through Iris Murdoch," Diego Romero Laje-Dávila (Literature)
2025: "The Ethics of Melancholia: Lacan, Loss, and the Limits of Meaning in Everything Everywhere All At Once," Vivian Guo (Literature)
2024: "An Empire of Contestation: Intersections of Material and Visual Cultures," Shourya Agarwal (Literature)
2023: "Holding Out for a Hero: Filipina Representations and Absences in U.S. Pop Culture," Tessa Delgo (Literature)
2022: "Reforming Retribution: Class Systems, Capital Punishment, and Criminal Justice in Mary Shelley's 'Frankenstein' and Charles Dickens's 'Oliver Twist'," Kari Larsen (English)
2021: "Mameloshn in Modernity: Yiddish Alternate Histories in Jewish-American Fiction," Jordan B. Diamond (Jewish Studies)
2020: "The Body in the Field of Desire," Caroline Waring (Literature)
2019: [titles unavailable], Tae Catalina Markey (Literature) and Jack Markey (English)
2018: "Smoking's Hereafter: Theorizing Post-Cigarette America," Elliott Golden (Literature)
2017: "Creative Impulse in the Modern Age: The Embodiment of Anxiety in the Early Poetry of T.S. Eliot (1910–1917)," Anna Elizabeth Mukamal (English)
2016: "The Anamorphic 'Figure in the Carpet': James, Kafka, Morrison, and Mitchell," Jacqueline Chipkin (English)
2015: "Every Dram of Woman's Flesh: Paulina's Role and Remedy in 'The Winter's Tale'," Bailey Sincox (English)
2014: "Maker of Myself? Unveiling the Critical Reception of Sylvia Plath and Her Biographers," Danielle Nelson (Women's Studies)
2013: "Divinity Architecture," Sarah Frazier van Name (Literature)
2012: "'They are Shut': Confessing the Truth of Skepticism and Acknowledging the Possibility for Tragedy. A Reading of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations with Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground," Michael McCreary (Philosophy)
2011: "Germans! Fascists!: Questioning the Neorealist Narrative of Discontinuity," Kelsey Cameron (Literature)
2010: "Flesh and Blood, Bodies of Difference, and Strategies of Representation," Tassity Johnson (Literature)
2009: "Italian Noir: A New Mystery for an Unresolved Italy," Arthur Lei (Italian Studies)
2008: "The Making and Unmaking of the Suicide Bomber," Michael Haley (Literature)
2007: "'Out of Me Now My Mind Can Pour': Subjectivity, Communication, and Art in Virginia Woolf's Novels," Erin Greer (Literature)
2006: "'We Are United by the Imagination, by Creativity, by Tomorrow…': The Zapatistas and the Weapons of Words," Emily LaDue (Literature)
2005: "The Politics of the Military in the Plays of John Fletcher," Eric Vivier (English)
2004: "The Madman, the Mystic, and the Other in Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway," DongWon Song (English)
2003: "A Voice of One's Own: Women, Love, and Self-Expression in the Interwar Novels of Elizabeth Bowen and Rosamond Lehmann," Cara Elizabeth Weber (Literature)
2002: "Melville's Use of the Faerie Queene in Moby-Dick," Jeffrey Stuart Glover (English)
2001: "Modern Gamesmanship on Postmodern Sleight of Hand: Nabokov's Lolita in the Works of Martin Amis," Maria Francesca Fackler (English)
2000: "Rooted in Turmoil: Gardens and Literature at the End of the Roman Republic," Keeley Catherine Schell (Classical Studies)
1999: "Syntax and Space in Wallace Stevens," Beau Madison Mount (English)
1998: "Do You Know What It Means? Reading, Innocence and Madness in Don DeLillo's The Names," David Sloan Rider (English)
1997: "Dahlgren at a Turning Point: The Fantastique Changing Epistemologies and the Coming of Contemporary Science Fiction," Joshua James LaBare (Literature)
1996: "'As Variously as Possible': A Contemporary Poetics," Andrew DuBois (English)
1995: "'What I Do is Me': Working the Self in the Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins," Michael Wenthe (English)
1994: "Writing Female Power, Writing Jewish-American Culture: Towards a Reevaluation of the Work of Anzia Yezierska," Jennifer Greeson (English)
1993: "What a Paradise It Seemed," Jeffrey Domina (English)
1992: "Following a Tough Act to Follow: John Barth from 1972 to 1992," Leigh Ammons (English)
1991: "Montaigne: Est-il Sceptique?," Emily Thompson (Romance Studies)