The Center for Medieval Studies offers two essay prizes each year: the O’Callaghan Essay Prize (named in honor of Professor Joseph O’Callaghan, a past Director of the Center for Medieval Studies) and the First-Year Essay Prize.
O’Callaghan Essay Prize in Medieval Studies
Faculty nominations of papers written on a medieval topic in any graduate course at Fordham are vetted by a panel of judges, who choose the best paper and award the prize in May after the year when the paper was written.
2011 – Camin Melton
The Embedded Cross in Andreas: Pointing to a New Kind of Punctuation in Old English Poetry
2010 – Sarah Townsend
Illustrating Social Status: Fashion in the Marginal Drawings of a Fourteenth Century Breviary from Tavistock, Devonshire
2009 – Richard P. Hresko
London Arms and Armor-Makers in the Fourteenth Century: A Portrait of a Medieval Industrial Sector
2008 – M. Christina Bruno
The Canon Law of Indulgences and its Audience: Franciscan Observant Sermons in Late Fifteenth-Century Italy
2007 – Samantha Sagui
Crime and Conviviality: The Social Space of Urban Drinking-Houses in Medieval England
2006 – Morgan Kay Franck
Prophecy in Welsh Manuscripts
2005 – Ken Mondschein
A Matter of Time
2004 – Jonathan Armstrong
Text and Tradition: The Journey to the Idea of the New Testament
2003 – Heidi Febert
Buckled, Wired and Pinned: The Mass Consumption of Metal Dress Accessories in Late Medieval England
2002 – Rebecca Slitt
Dedicated to Peace: Political Allegory in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae
2001 – Janine Larmon Peterson
Ephemeral Boundaries: The Transmission of Alberic of Montecassino’s Breviarum de Dictamine
1998 – Steven A. Schoenig, S.J.
Ramwold’s Reform: The Customary of St. Emmeram and the Gorze Movement
1996 – Brian Klinzig
The Tin Industry of Early 14th-Century Cornwall: Miners, Merchants, & Entrepreneurs
1995 – Lori Pieper, SFO
In Search of Sanctity: St. Elizabeth of Hungary
1994 – Holly Hager Gilbert
Gender and Authority in Medieval England: Monastic Elections in the Diocese of Lincoln, 1258-1299
First-Year Graduate Essay Prize
Faculty nominations of papers written by a grad student in his or her first year at Fordham on a medieval topic, and under 25 pages in length, are vetted by a panel of judges who award the prize in the May after the year in which the paper was written.
2011 – Co-Winners
John Burden
Petrarch and the Pursuit of Fame in The Ascent of Mount Ventoux
Br. John Glasenapp OSB
Unsounded Number: Music, Architecture, and Meaning at the Dedication of the Cathedral of Florence
2010 – William Little
The Virtues, Friendship, and Rhetoric in Einhard’s Vita Karoli Magni
2009 – Carlo DaVia
Augustine and the Secularization of the Polity
2008 – Peter Slonina
A Critical Treatment of Plimpton Addition MS 04
2007 – Kevin T. Mallon
To Realize, Rectify, & Release: The Purpose of Reading in Petrarch's Secretum
2006 – Nicole Brennan
Two Versions of the Sermo Lupi ad Anglos
2005 – James Manning
Judging a Book by its Covers: An Analysis of a “Mass Produced” Book of Hours
2004 – Heather Blatt
Memory and the City in Troilus and Criseyde
2003 – Heidi Febert
“Roland is Brave and Oliver is Wise”: The Meaning of Vassalage in The Song of Roland
2002 – James S. Tedford
A Case for the Interpolation of the Genesis 1:26 Periscope in the Sefer ha Berit of Rabbi Joseph ben Issac Kimhi
2001– Co-Winners
Denise Griggs
Chrétien in Context: Bibliothéque Nationale, f. fr. 1450
Tomas Zahora
Laughing in the Cloister with the Philosopher
2000 – Maureen Horgan
The Beguines of Leuven and the Crib of the Infant Jesus: A Closer Look
1999 – Janine Larmon Peterson
The Historicity of Marginalia: Glossing Lucan's Bellum Civile
1997 – Co-Winners
Sarah Hull
The Manuscript Culture of Bodley 130
Jennifer Speed
Saints, Relics, and Sacred Space in Medieval France
1996 – Rob Vosburgh
The Illumination Programs of MS Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Banco Rari 217
