Student Awards

See below for details about MAPH's annual student awards, which honor students who engage in outstanding work during their time in the program.
 

The aim of the MAPH Thesis Awards is to showcase some of the wonderful and various thesis projects that develop out of the MAPH year, and to help bring this work to a wider audience. To be clear, there is no financial prize or certification associated with these awards.

Selection Process:

1. Around May/June, the MAPH Awards Committee solicits nominations from preceptors, for exceptional thesis projects in any of these categories that were submitted in the preceding twelve months. These nominations are collected by the Committee who meet to review, discuss, and vote within each category, with awards decided by a simple numerical tally. (Tie-breaks are decided on a simple show of hands.)

2. We aim to email award recipients by the end of June, with any public announcements following shortly after.

Description of each award category:

Critical: These are traditional academic articles within a disciplinary home in the Humanities. We look for theses that develop an interesting, nuanced, cogent, and compelling argument. The thesis should intervene in scholarly conversations and add something to existing knowledge or ways of thinking about an object. We are looking for originality of argument, quality of research, clarity and sophistication of writing and argument, methodological approach, and disciplinary engagement.

Creative: Whether fiction, non-fiction, poetry, performance, or in other forms, we are looking for creative theses that demonstrate intentionality of form, control of craft, and thematic coherence. While we are particularly interested in how the execution of this creative piece, we also consider the contribution of the critical accompaniment to the overall project.
 
Intrepid: The Intrepid category is intended to award ambition, interdisciplinarity, student progress, and the pursuit of projects that exemplify the best of MAPH. This category emerged for pieces that didn’t clearly fit in either the critical or creative categories, because they were public-facing and innovative in ways that merited a different set of award considerations. 

Past thesis award winners and their theses can be found on MAPH's Common Forms website. 

External Thesis Awards

• Art History Department MAPH Thesis Prize
• Center for East Asian Studies M.A. Thesis Prize in Japan Studies
• Karla Scherer Center for the Study of American Culture MAPH Thesis Prize
• Nicholson Center for British Studies MAPH Thesis Prize

All MAPH staff and preceptors are able to nominate one student for the Dean's Award for Excellence each academic year. Three prizes are presented each year with a financial award. These prizes are only available to students to meet the following requirements.

Eligibility:

1. Student is currently enrolled in the MAPH program and expects to graduate in the coming Spring Convocation (or has graduated in the same academic year). That is, TLO students in their first year are not eligible.

2. Student has successfully completed all program requirements to date and is eligible for graduation

Criteria:

The awardees should exemplify the best qualities of MAPH. We expect that strong nominees will stand out in more than one of the following areas; they need not demonstrate all of the qualities listed.

• Commitment to personal and ethical growth. Someone with moral integrity, a person of probity, kindness, and generosity.
   
• Good citizen of the program, contributing to the well-being and broader intellectual life of their cohort. The candidate may, for instance, offer particularly thoughtful responses to the writing of their peers, attend social hours and MAPH talks, organize a reading group, edit Common Forms, participate in WIP.
   
• Social conscience and concern for others, as demonstrated by campus and community service, and/or dedication to social issues.
   
• Intellectual curiosity and openness to ideas.
   
• Academic excellence and model classroom participant.

Please note that this award is distinct from the MAPH thesis awards, which are decided solely on the quality and interest of the thesis.