Winners Announced for 2025 Schuchard Prize

The Harry Ransom Center at The University of Texas at Austin has awarded the fourth-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.

Jessica Lu’s winning project on Anne Sexton’s art and poetry was inspired by a painting she first encountered during a class visit to the Ransom Center. “Visiting the Harry Ransom Center with my Plan II World Literature class, I was introduced to a panoply of primary documents, from manuscripts by the Brontë sisters and letters by Sylvia Plath to journals and other literary works,” she noted. “Yet, strikingly, what captured my interest wasn’t a work of writing, but rather a portrait painting by Anne Sexton, in which conflicted green strokes obscured the face and turbulent swirls of blue dominated the background. Although I knew nothing about Sexton herself at the time, nor had I read any of her work, I interpreted this painting as telling a story of its own—one of conflict and inner turmoil—that sparked my initial curiosity about Sexton’s life.”

2024-2025 Schuchard Prize Winners

First Place: Jessica Lu, Plan II Honors and Biology major, project title: “Canvas of the Mind: Anne Sexton’s Artistic Expression of Mental Turmoil”

Second Place: Aidan Springer, English Honors and Rhetoric and Writing major, project title: “Motivations Behind Virginia’s Colonization: The Little Ice Age”

Honorable Mention: Lauren Wheeler, Plan II and Chemistry major, project title: “Phenomenally a Woman: Revisions of Female Literature Through Maya Angelou”

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.