Cecilia Konchar Farr Award for Best Feminist
Essay
Given at the RMMLA Convention
The Women's Caucus and the RMMLA offer the Cecilia Konchar Farr Award
for the best essay presented at the RMMLA convention employing
techniques of feminist criticism. Coordination and funding is
provided by the RMMLA Executive Board. The RMMLA Women's Caucus
arranges readers and a selection process. The award carries with it
a $100 prize.
Cecilia Konchar Farr is Associate Professor of English and
Women's Studies and Chair of English at the College of St. Catherine
in St. Paul, Minnesota. A feminist theorist, she believes that
activism and education are intimately related and that good teaching
is, in bell hooks's words, "teaching to transgress." This theory,
put into practice, met with resistance in the early stages of her
career when her work with activist student groups as well as her
public stands against domestic violence and for reproductive and gay
rights cost her her first job. Building coalitions for political
action with community groups and the RMMLA LGBT Caucus, Professor
Konchar Farr led the Women's Caucus of RMMLA and, later, the MLA
through the nineties. In 1994, in honor of her courage and
leadership, the Women's Caucus, by acclamation, named their yearly
award for outstanding feminist essay after her.
Dr. Konchar Farr earned her Ph.D. at Michigan State University in
1990, her M.A. at Brigham Young University and her B.A. at Slippery
Rock State College in Pennsylvania. Her publications include Reading Oprah: The Talking Life of Novels (SUNY 2004), as well
as articles and chapters on Martha Gellhorn, Cynthia Ozick, Herman
Melville, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. She teaches,
studies and writes about modernism, contemporary U.S. culture,
reading theories, feminist theories and Mormon culture. A native
Pittsburgher (b. 1958), she now lives in St. Paul where she reads,
writes, bikes, and mothers two children.
The recipient of the Cecilia Konchar Farr Award for 2008 is Precious McKenzie-Stearns, University of
South Florida for her paper entitled "Mary Kingsley: 'Set yourself to gain personal power.'"
presented at the Women's Caucus Seminar "Gendered 'I's in Literature and Film" held in Calgary on October 11, 2007.
Papers from the 2008 RMMLA convention in Reno which address feminist
ideas or employ feminist theory are eligible for the 2009
competition. To apply, submit a copy of the essay (written in English only) BY EMAIL ATTACHMENT TO rmmla@wsu.org by
December 15. Print applications will no longer be accepted.
The winner of the award is announced by March 1 and will serve on
the selection committee for the following year's competition.
Recent Farr Award recipients:
- 2007 Lisa Byrd (University of Tennessee)
"Spectacle of Strangeness: Anti-masque Nature in Jonson's Masque of Queens,"
- 2006 Janna Knittel (St. Cloud State University)
"Privilege in Confinement: Emily Dickinson's Poetic Form."
- 2005 Douglas W. Werden (West Texas A & M University)
"'She kept an air of secrecy and importance to the last':
Abortion in Sarah Orne Jewett's The Country of the Pointed Figs."
- 2004 Genevieve Gabrielle Generaux (University of Nevada, Las Vegas)
"The Development of Queen Guinevere:
Character Foil Turned Political Faction."
- 2003 - Margaret Lowry (Texas Christian University)
"Narrative of Nation, Narrative of Home: Autobiographical
Cultural Critique in Caroline Kirkland’s A New Home, Who’ll
Follow?"
- 2002 - Robbin D. Crabtree and David Alan Sapp (Fairfield
University [CT])
"Theoretical, Political, and Pedagogical Challenges in the
Feminist Classroom: Our Struggles to Walk the Walk."
- 2001 - Lori Maybee Reagan (Auburn University)
"Gendering the Hetero/Homosexual Body: The Role of the Critic in
Constructing Gender and Ideology in M. Butterfly."
- 2000 - Katherine Harris (City University of New York)
"Imoinda's Heroism as the 'Inappropriate Other' in Aphra Behn's Oroonoko and Thomas Southerne's
Oroonoko: A Tragedy."
- 1999 - H. Jordan Landry (University of Colorado)
"Queering Abolitionist Discourse on Black Women: The Female
Trickster-Rogue in Harriet E. Wilson's Our Nig."
- 1998 - Ann A. Huse (Washington University)
"'The Copy Greater Than Th'Original': Cultural Competition and
Gender in Katherine Philips's Pompey."
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2004 ROCKY MOUNTAIN MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION
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