HAA Student Prize Winners AY 20-21

May 27, 2021
All student prize winners from HAA, AY21

Please join us in celebrating this years student prize winners from HAA. 

Thomas Temple Hoopes Prize - HAA graduating seniors Alden Fossett and Eliza Rubin have won 2021 Thomas Temple Hoopes Prizes for their respective senior theses Rotimi Fani-Kayode’s (no-place): A Spiritual Offering for an Empty World, and Sacred Desire: Multiplicity and Mystery in Parmigianino’s Madonna of the Long Neck. In addition to recognizing students' "excellence in undergraduate work," the Hoopes Prize also recognizes supervising faculty for their "excellence in the art of teaching." Thus we have also to congratulate HAA Professors Robin Kelsey and Jeffrey Hamburger for advising these two prize-winning projects.

Taliesin Prize for Distinction in the Art of Learning - Please join us in congratulating Audrey Pettner, joint concentrator in History of Art and Architecture and Folklore and Mythology for winning the 2021 Taliesin Prize for Distinction in the Art of Learning. Audrey is one of three graduating seniors to win the prize this year. The prize is awarded to seniors “who best exhibit a spirit of intellectual adventure in their curricular paths as Harvard undergraduates." Audrey's senior thesis addressed the question and image of "the river" in the Brazilian landscape paintings of 17th century Dutch artist Frans Post.

Kathryn Ann Huggins Prize - Congratulations to Yuke Zheng, joint concentrator in History of Art and Architecture and Computer Science, who won for his senior thesis Subversion Through Sign: W.E.B. Du Bois’s 1900 Data Visualizations. This prize is awarded for an outstanding thesis on a topic relating to African American life, history, or culture. 

Derek C. Bok Award - Congratulations to Kirsten Burke, G4, who has won the Bok Award for "excellence in the graduate student teaching of undergraduates." Only five of these awards are given out, Harvard-wide, each year. The award recognizes Burke for her exceptional work as TF throughout the COVID crisisincluding for the Senior Thesis Seminar. Burke also organized informal reading and writing groups for undergraduates and helped inspire the Harvard Undergraduate Art History Society.

Bowdoin Prize for Graduate Essays in the English Language - Congratulations to Max Boersma, G5, who won for his project entitled Hannah Höch’s Degendered Geometries. This prize is awarded for "the best essay of high literary merit written by a graduate student in the field of learning."

Departmental Prizes

The Matthew Abramson '96 Prize for Best Senior Thesis in History of Art and Architecture - Congratulations again to Audrey Pettner. The Matthew Abramson '96 Prize is awarded by faculty vote of the Department of History of Art and Architecture to the one student of this department whose thesis has been determined as "Best Senior Thesis" as based primarily upon the combined numerical score of the grades submitted by all readers, with subsequent discussion and vote in the department honors meeting.

The Claire Martin Fairman History of Art and Architecture Undergraduate Thesis Prize - Congratulations to Kaitlin Hao (for her senior thesis I Want to Disappear in My Art:” Story-Tinkering in the Practice of Lam Tung Pang) and Alden Fossett. The Fairman Prize is awarded to that senior thesis which is found, by faculty vote, to be most worthy, and of a topic focusing on modern art.

James Sloss Ackerman Senior Thesis Prize in Architecture - Congratulations to Samantha Meade, who won for her senior thesis Successful Taste: American Domestic Design in the House Beautiful from 1896-1906. The prize is awarded, by a vote of the Faculty, to a senior thesis of the highest merit on a topic in the history, theory, and/or design of architecture.

See also: General News