Winners Announced for 2023 Schuchard Prize

The Harry Ransom Center at The University of Texas at Austin has awarded the second-annual Ronald Schuchard Undergraduate Archival Research Prize to three outstanding researchers. The competition awards cash prizes to the top undergraduate research papers or digital projects created using primary source material from the Center’s archival collections.

On Wednesday, April 26, the 2023 Schuchard Prize winners were honored at a reception at the Harry Ransom Center.

“Some of you know that this is personally very meaningful to me,” Director Stephen Enniss said. “It was established by a mentor of mine, Professor Ron Schuchard…he’s the distinguished professor at Emory University, where I worked with him for 16 years, but a UT alum. Really, his own use of archives has transformed his professional career. His most recent publication was The Collected Prose of T.S. Eliot, a massive multi-volume set that’s a real work of scholarship and accomplishment, and his hope in establishing this prize was that the way that primary source research informed his own professional life, that it might also inform a new generation of students and scholars in their lives.”

2022-2023 Schuchard Prize Winners

1st Place: Nicolas Silva, History and English double major, “The Making of ‘Edmund Kean’: Celebrity Image and Theatrical Culture in Regency London”

2nd Place: Sofia Moore, History major, “Form and Function: Materiality and Purpose of the HRC 195 Book of Heraldry”

Honorable Mention: Harmony Burk, English and Philosophy double major, “Heresies and Ink Burn: An Investigation into the Material Production and Corrosion of HRC 186”

The Ransom Center is an internationally renowned humanities research library and museum with extensive collections that deepen the understanding of literature, photography, film, art and the performing arts. The Center offers research opportunities and support to help students at all levels use primary source materials to make a personal connection with history, deepening understanding and sparking investigation and creativity.

About Ronald Schuchard

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.