The Women in German Dissertation Prize comes out of the Women in German Memorial Fund. This Fund was established in memory of those of our member who have died and whose presence and participation in WiG we want to commemorate in an active way each year. In 1997 we established this Dissertation Prize in their memory. It is now completing its fifth year. The fund is replenished by contributions from our membership and we encourage each of you to consider donating an amount – smaller or larger, depending on your circumstances – to keep it stocked. Donations can be sent to the WiG treasurer.
The terms of the WiG Dissertation Prize are as follows: Dissertations written by a WiG member that have been completed and filed in the preceding academic year are eligible, provided they are consonant with our mission statement. A dissertation can be nominated either by the candidate herself, by her dissertation director, or by another scholar familiar with her work.
The chair of the Dissertation Prize committee forwards all the eligible manuscripts she receives to a panel of three judges. The judges select the prize winner and the award is announced at the award ceremony held at the annual Women in German conference. For the 2001 constest, the judges were: Leslie Adelson (Cornell University), Shawn Jarvis (St. Cloud State University), and Lynne Tatlock (Washington University). Katherine Goodman (Brown University) was the committee chair.
The 2001 award for the best dissertation by a WiG member was given to Wendy C. Nielsen for her dissertation, "Female Acts of Violence: French Revolutionary Theater in British and German Romantic Drama." She completed her dissertation at the University of California/Davis under the direction of Gail Finney in September 2001. She is currently working in the writing center at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Wendy was present at the recent conference to receive the award.
In her letter of nomination Gail Finney wrote:
Dr. Nielsen’s dissertation is a wide-ranging comparative study of German, English, and French romantic dramas about female figures who commit violent heroic acts against the literal or metaphoric backdrop of the French Revolution, above all plays by Christine Westphalen, Karoline von Günderrode, Olympe de Gouges, Elizabeth Inchbald, Heinrich von Kleist, and Percy B. Shelley. Exemplifying feminist scholarship at its finest, this study consummately reflects the values embodied in the Women in German Mission Statement. Whereas in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Europe violent women were typically marked as outcasts because they were regarded as opponents of the republican ideals that had motivated the Rench Revolution, Dr. Nielsen contextualizes female violence by investigating the ways in which it is staged to confront ideological issues of the day. By historicizing female violence, she demythologizes it.
Dr. Nielsen contextualizes female violence in two main ways: by discussing the plays she treats against the background of key contemporaneous aesthetic, philosophical, and political writings (by thinkers such as Edmund Burke and Mary Wollstonecraft), and by studying the dramas of lesser-known female playwrights in the light of work by their more renowned male contemporaries, e.g., Westphalen’s tragedy Charlotte Corday is read through the thought of Schiller and Wilhelm von Humboldt, and Günderrode’s Hildgund is juxtaposed with Kleist’s Penthesilea. This rich, prismatic approach to a topic that has received only scant attention adds much to our understanding of the relationship between violence, gender, and drama in the decades around 1800."
In their letter, the competition judges wrote the following words of praise.
"With erudition and insight this dissertation plumbs the significance of revolutionary violence for the social history of women’s rights and the symbolic capital of their acts in three markedly different national contexts. The theater, events, and ideas of a nascent modernity come alive as keen feminist analyses are brought to bear on violence in the age of reason, virtue, and sentimentality. Challenging some commonplaces in Enlightenment, Romantic, and even feminist scholarship, this intellectually ambitious work both recovers key moments of women’s modern history and advances a newly critical understanding of the central role that feminism has to play in analyzing modern concepts such as freedom, citizenship, justice, and especially violence in the name of national virtue. This historically focused study of the period around 1800 thus speaks to our contemporary concerns as well."
Congratulations Wendy! We wish you well!