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The Ronald Schuchard Undergraduate Archival Research Prize

The Schuchard Undergraduate Archival Research Prize is awarded each academic year to the best papers or digital projects created using primary source material from the Ransom Center's archival collections. All current UT undergraduates who have completed an academic project involving archival research in Ransom Center collections are encouraged to apply.

The First Place Award is $1000, the Second Place Award is $700, and an Honorable Mention Award for Freshmen and Sophomore students is $300. Award recipients will be announced in appropriate venues and be recognized at a ceremony in their honor at the Center.

This award can affect any financial aid you receive this academic year. Please contact the Office of Scholarships and Financial Aid to see if the award exceeds your cost of attendance. If so, you may need to submit an appeal. If you do not receive any financial aid, you can disregard these instructions.

  • Application

    Application Period: January 23–March 22, 2024.

    Winners will be announced April 15 and a Recognition Ceremony will be held at the Center on April 30.

    To Apply:

    Applications are accepted via a digital self-nomination form. Applications will include a 1-page cover letter and a sample or full version of the archival research essay, digital project, honors thesis, writing sample, or creative project.

    To be eligible for the Schuchard Undergraduate Archival Research Prize, a student:

      • Must be a current UT undergraduate at any class level and in any discipline (humanities, sciences, social sciences)
      • Must have completed their archival research project using Ransom Center collections in the form of an essay, digital project, or honors thesis related to a specific class or course of study at UT.

    Application Components:

      • Cover Letter
        Describes the applicant’s research process and the extent to which they engaged with selected materials to develop their project
      • Archival Research Project
        • Can be an essay, digital project, honors thesis, writing sample, or creative project
        • Does not have to be a finished project at time of submission, but should be close to completion

    The deadline for 2023–2024 academic year applications is March 22, 2024.

  • Past Winners

    2023

    First Place: Nicolas Silva, History and English, "The Making of 'Edmund Kean': Celebrity Image and Theatrical Culture in Regency London"
    Second Place: Sofia Moore, History, "Form and Function: Materiality and Purpose of the HRC 195 Book of Heraldry"
    Honorable Mention: Harmony Burk, English and Philosophy, "Heresies and Ink Burn: An Investigation into the Material Production and Corrosion of HRC 186"

    2022

    First Place: Macaella Gray, Art History, "At the Lock Gates of Surrealism: Bief Magazine (1958-60)"
    Second Place: Megan Snopik, English, "On Reading Woolf, On Reading Illness: Situating Disability in Modernism"
    Honorable Mention: Breigh Plat, Plan II Honors and Sociology, “The Slut You Are: West, Kincaid, and Sexton on Subaltern Sexuality”

  • Donor
    Ronald Schuchard, a graduate of The University of Texas at Austin and the Goodrich C. White Professor of English and Irish Studies, Emeritus, at Emory University, is the author of numerous studies of modern authors, particularly T. S. Eliot and W. B. Yeats. His Eliot's Dark Angel won the Robert Penn Warren / Cleanth Brooks Prize for outstanding literary criticism, and his The Last Minstrels: Yeats and the Revival of the Bardic Arts won the Robert Rhodes Prize for an outstanding book on Irish Literature. He is co-editor with John Kelly of three volumes of The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats and general editor of the eight-volume online and print editions of The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot. A former Guggenheim Fellow, he is presently a Senior Research Fellow in the Institute of English Studies, University of London, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
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