Recognizes the best essay written by a graduate student SLSA member
The Bruns Graduate Essay Prize, established by Katherine Hayles to honor her parents, is awarded annually to the best essay written by a graduate student member of the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts. Graduate students wishing to have their essays considered for the $500 prize should submit them by June 1 to Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal, University of Basel, via electronic mail to ranjodhsingh.dhaliwal@unibas.ch. Please send a copy of your formatted essay as a PDF or Word file, or send a pointer to a URL where the essay is posted.
Note: the Bruns and Schachterle awards are presented during the Business Meeting of the annual fall conference. One may submit only one entry to one of the two essay prize competitions.
Previous Winners
- Yondong Li, “Peasants, Workers, and Productivity—A Media History of Greenhouse Farming,” 2025
- Ethan Plaue, “The Patent Form: Norbert Rillieux, Solomon Northup, and the Production of Means in the Atlantic World”, 2024
- Henry Osman, “Pure Hardware, or Affect and Ideology on the Analog Circuit”, 2023
- Doug Stark, “Playing with Habit: David Sudnow’s Video Game Pilgrimage”, 2022
- Akrish Adhikari, “Writing as Biometric: The Case of Graphology and Keystroke Dynamics”, 2021
- Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal, “On addressability, or what even is computing?”, 2020
- Sarah Ciston, “Whispering into the Void Loop (): Co-Writing with AI, Error as Poetics,” 2019
- Peter M. Flannery, “Silver Linings: Visualising the (Post) Anthropocene, Technology, and Post-Human in Photography,” 2018
- Dagmar Van Engen, “Disordered Time and Alien Natural Law: Queer Invertebrate Evolution in At the Mountain of Madness,” 2017
- Michelle Huang, “Ecologies of Entanglement in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch,” 2016
- Brittany Roberts for her essay “Touching Bare Life in the ‘Corridor of Absolute Dying’: Biopolitics, Necrorealism, and Resistance in Evgenii Iufit’s ‘Spring,’” 2015
- Julian Gill-Peterson,“The Technical Capabilities of the Body: Assembling Race, Technology, and Transgender”, 2014
- Aleksandra Hernandez, “William Carlos Williams’s Spring and All and the Poetics of Noise”, 2013
- Karalyn Kendall-Morwick, “Dogging the Subject: Samuel Beckett, Emmanuel Levinas, and Posthumanist Ethics”, 2012
- Jessica Kuskey, “Our Mutual Engine”, 2011
- David Cecchetto, “Performing Deconstruction: Posthumanism, Primary Affectivity and Mark Hansen’s Media Theory”, 2010
- Stephanie Boluk, “Seriality, the Literary and Database in Homestar Runner: Some Old Issues in New Media”, 2009
- Sean Miller, “Imagining Braneworlds in String Theory Technical Discourse”, 2008
- Bernard Geoghegan, “Against Embodiment: Gesture Amidst Technics and Embodied Agents”, 2007
- Vera Bühlmann, “Intelligent Skin: Real Virtual”, 2006
- Benjamin Robertson, “On Moral Science: The Problematic Politics of Stuart Kauffman’s Order”, 2005
- Jodie Nicotra, “Darwinian Seductions: John Campbell, Samuel Butler, and the Rhetoric of Fascination”, 2004
- Colin Milburn, “Nanotechnology in the Age of Posthuman Engineering: Science Fiction and Science”, 2003
- Benjamin Cohen, “The Element of the Table: Reading and Representing the Visual Discourse of Chemical Practices”, 2002
- Carol Wald, “The Fairy in the Net: Agency, Class, and Evolution in the Letters of Ada Byron Lovelace”, 2001
- Rebecca Knell, 2000
- Douglas Davis, “A Hundred Million Hydrogen Bombs: The Cold-War Science of Geological Catastrophism”, 1999
