Charles Davis Award for the Outstanding Graduate Student Presentation at the RMMLA Convention

Charles Davis, Professor Emeritus of English at Boise State University, served as Executive Director of the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association for twelve years, from 1985 through 1997. During his tenure, the Association grew significantly in number of members and in prestige, and the Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature published articles of great interest to the membership. For his service to the RMMLA and his support of graduate students and young scholars, the Executive Board established in 2000 the "Charles Davis Award for the Outstanding Graduate Student Presentation at the RMMLA Convention."

The Charles Davis Award carries a $100 prize. The full text of the winning presentation(s) will be published in the fall issue of The Rocky Mountain E-Review.

Application procedure:

• Nominations must be made by the Chair of the session in which the student presented. Nominations are sent to the Secretariat by November 1.
• Nominees will be contacted and asked to submit the presentation (written in English only) in a 'publishable' form and a one-page CV BY EMAIL ATTACHMENT to the Secretariat, e-postmarked no later than December 12. Print applications will no longer be accepted. NB: By 'publishable' is meant either a traditional paper format or, if the presentation was a PowerPoint presentation or similar, that copies of the PowerPoint slides must be accompanied by a fairly traditional paper-like narrative.)

The Davis Award Selection Committee is made up of three RMMLA Board members and the previous year's winner. Selection is based first on the completeness of the application, followed by a ranking based on five criteria: originality of research; scholarly context (reference to current research on topic); mechanics and style; coherent thesis statement; and contribution to scholarship in the field of study. The award will be announced by March 1.

Recent Davis Award recipients:

• 2011 - Heidi Giles (University of Arizona)
  "Resolving the Institution of Marriage: Eighteenth-Century Courtship Novels"
  AND
  Trisha Tucker (University of Southern California)
  "Inferior Fictions: Gendering the Evangelical Novel"

• 2010 - Melina Moore (Smith College)
  "Giving Words to the Dark Tale": Mary Shelley's Mathilda and the Struggle for Female Narrative Subjectivity"

• 2009 - Marie Isabel Gardett (University of Utah)
  "The Sorcerers’ Presidents: Shamanic Language and Power on the Campaign Trail"

  Jarod Anderson (Ohio University)
  "Milton’s Outsiders: The Decentralization of Morality in Paradise"

• 2008 - Gladys Nubla (University of California, Berkeley)
  "Mourning a Lost Innocence: The Child of Sex Tourism."

  Darcy Irvin (University of California, Davis)
  "'Sacred to the Memory': Image-Text in The Woman in White."

  Brandi Martinez (University of Nevada, Reno)
  "Out of the Closet and onto the Prose Page: Margaret Cavendish's Drama and the Shaping of her Prose."

• 2007 - Lindsay Christopher (University of Denver)
  "Mapping the Garden: The Geographical Imagination in Toni Morrison’s Paradise
  AND
  Michael Bachmann (University of Mainz, Germany)
  "Writing Fiction, Talking Life: Wiesel, Kertész and Problems of Genre."

• 2006 - Amy Hamilton (University of Arizona)
  "'You better keep right on walking': Remembering Migration and Removal in American Indian Women's Poetry"
  AND
  Wendy Roberts (Northwestern University)
  "Regionalizing Christianity: Charles Sheldon's In His Steps in the Context of Regionalist Fiction."

  Runners-up - Jordan Green (University of Oregon) and Matthew Landers (Louisiana State University)

• 2005 - Hilda Ma (The State University of New York at Buffalo)
  "The Medicalization of ‘Midnight Hags’: Macbeth and Witchcraft in Early Modern England"
  AND
  Cynthia Schoolar Williams (Tufts University)
  "Reading the Lactating Body in John Webster’s The White Devil."

  Runner-up - Graham Lyons (Simon Fraser University)

• 2004 - Almila Ozdek (George Washington University)
  "Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres: Earth and Body as the Object of Capitalist Ownership."

  Runner-up - Hannah Lavery (University of Sheffield)

• 2003 - Melissa Hussain (Washington State University)
  "The Political Economy of Anger: A Hermeneutic for Third World Women's Texts" presented at the Women's Voices in Prose session
  AND
  Hans-Georg Erney (Emory University)
  "Modernity in South Asian Literature: An Exercise in Postcolonial Ecocriticism" presented in the Ecocriticism session

  Runners-up - Tim Gruenewald ( University of Washington) and Wendy R. Miller Roberts (University of Arizona)

• 2002 - Caroline E. Wiebe Kimberly (Tulane University)
  "Man or Myth?: The Writing of John Keats."

• 2001 - Elizabeth Gruber, University of Nevada, Reno
  "Erotic Politics Reconsidered: Marriage and Miscegenation in The Merchant of Venice."
• 2000 (First Award), Linda Naranjo-Huebl (University of Colorado at Boulder)
  "Attractive Oppression: The Breakdown of Intersubjectivity and the Erotics of Dominiation and Subordination in The Wide, Wide World, and Our Nig."

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