Winners Announced for 2026 Schuchard Prize

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

Connor Grim’s winning project analyzes gender nonconformity in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, Woolf’s relationship to Vita Sackville-West who inspired the character of Orlando, and writings from the British Sexological Society, an early 20th century organization that promoted the scientific study of sex. Grim’s project relied on his close reading of annotations in the Center’s copy of Orlando, in which the son of Vita Sackville-West, Nigel Nicholson, points out details of Orlando’s character that align with his mother’s personality and life. Through his comparison of Nicholson’s reflections with Woolf’s writing and the British Sexological Society’s scientific texts, Grim provides a window into two contemporaneous discussions about gender nonconformity.

The 2026 Schuchard Prize winners were honored at a reception at the Harry Ransom Center on Wednesday, April 29th.

2025-2026 Schuchard Prize Winners

First Place: Connor Grim, Plan II and Mathematics, “A Counterexample to Sexual Categorization: Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and the British Sexological Society on the Morality of Gender Nonconformity”

Second Place: Eden Goodman, Psychology, “How James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room Explores the Consequences of Denial/The Anatomy of a Lie: A Visual Representation of David’s Dualities”

Third Place: Zoe Lynch, Plan II and Classical Studies, “An ‘Unself-Consciousness of Race:’ Zora Neale Hurston, Fannie Hurst, and Black Identity in Tell My Horse”

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.