Graduate and undergraduate students whose work stood out across teaching, writing, and scholarship.
by Fabiola M. Martinez Del Valle
The Department of English is proud to recognize graduate and undergraduate students whose work in teaching, writing, and scholarship received awards in 2026. Their achievements reflect the intellectual curiosity, creativity, and commitment to community that define our department.
This year’s student award recipients represent the talent, curiosity, and commitment that make our department thrive. Their achievements in teaching, writing, and scholarship show the many ways students contribute to the intellectual and creative life of our community.
Graduate student awards
Campus‑wide TA teaching awards
Capstone TA Teaching Award
Diego Alegría
Diego Alegría (Literary Studies PhD student) received a Capstone TA Teaching Award, which recognizes teaching assistants with an outstanding teaching record during their UW–Madison tenure. A bilingual teacher and scholar from Santiago, Chile, Alegría is completing a PhD in English with a minor in Spanish and a certificate in Public Humanities. His dissertation studies the role of poetic syntax in the emergence of modern poetry in English and Spanish, focusing on British Romanticism and Spanish American Modernismo. He is also a Spanish‑speaking poet and essayist, author of Raíz abierta (2015), versare (2024), the bilingual chapbook y sin embargo los umbrales / and yet the thresholds (2019), and the essay collection Poética del caminar: Poems (1817) de John Keats (2023).
Alegría has taught courses including Literature and Environment, Literature and Film, and Literature and Culture II, and has served as instructor of record for English 100. He has also worked as a Writing Center tutor and taught creative writing and literary criticism workshops for local high school students. Reflecting on his teaching, Alegría said, “My favorite classes are usually the ones where common conceptions around language and literature are put into question through close reading and critical thinking,” he said. He notes that the Department of English has taught him to teach differently, more inductively and with careful attention to the diverse backgrounds students bring to the classroom. “I particularly enjoy when students intuitively identify a complex rhetorical, grammatical, or literary phenomenon without necessarily knowing its name or its history within the discipline,” he said. “In those moments, I first build on their interpretive intuition and then introduce the relevant analytical category, sometimes highlighting its rich development in the field. I believe these moments spark students’ curiosity and deepen their engagement not only with the course, but also with language and literature in new and exciting ways.”
Early Excellence in Teaching Award
Ellie Kincaid
Ellie Kincaid (Literary Studies PhD student) received an Early Excellence in Teaching Award, which recognizes exceptional performance by teaching assistants with fewer than four semesters of teaching experience. Kincaid studies queer and trans outdoor adventure stories and has been a TA for English courses including Introduction to College Writing and Why Shakespeare, in addition to teaching in the Writing Center.
Kincaid describes UW–Madison students as their favorite part of teaching. “UW students are so bright, curious, and open to learning, and my favorite part of my job is the vibrant classroom communities my students and I build together each semester!” they said. “I especially love seeing students grow into their own identities as writers, editors, and community members.” They also emphasize the department’s investment in teaching: “The Writing Center, English 100 program, undergraduate advising team, and the many teachers and mentors who support students across the department are essential to my ability to create meaningful learning environments.”
Department TA awards
Sandra Arfa Distinguished ESL TA Award
Reika Yoshida
Reika Yoshida (Graduate Teaching Assistant, ESL Program) was selected by the ESL Program as the recipient of the 2026 Sandra Arfa Distinguished ESL TA Award, which honors excellence in teaching and service within the program and commemorates longtime ESL Director Sandra Arfa. Over the past two years, Yoshida has been an exceptional TA. Joseph Nosek praises Yoshida’s ability to connect with students, promote collaboration, support learners inside and outside the classroom, and bring fresh ideas to weekly teachers’ meetings, contributing to a collaborative spirit in ESL 117. He noted that as a multilingual writer who has mastered English, Yoshida serves as an inspiring model for her students and thrives as an international graduate student at UW–Madison.
Yoshida earned perfect 4.0 evaluations in recent semesters, and student comments reflect deep appreciation for her teaching: “Reika is very kind and helpful. She’s very sweet and her class is always enjoyable. I can see that she tries her hardest to accommodate different learning styles. I would take her class again 100%,” and “Reika’s course was very helpful for my academic writing. I’ve learned a lot to make my essays more formal and I’m much more prepared for future academic study.” Another student wrote, “Perfect! A wonderful instructor! I loved ESL 117,” while others simply called her “one of the best teachers.”
E201 Outstanding Instructor Award
Taylor Dickson
Taylor Dickson (Composition and Rhetoric PhD student) received the E201 Outstanding Instructor Award for her work in Intermediate Composition. The award recognizes instructors whose teaching in English 201 demonstrates exceptional support for students, thoughtful course design, and a strong sense of intellectual play. Dickson’s teaching this year included an extended academic prank involving a “Box of Mystery, Possibility & Potential,” which became part of a classroom observation and a reflection on writing pedagogy as fun, emergence, and joy. Henry Covey notes Dickson’s ability to design challenging, engaging learning environments and her commitment to exploring writing as a site of curiosity and experimentation.
Dickson’s work in composition extends beyond the classroom. She is currently collaborating on an article titled “Trickster Pedagogy and Playful Administration in Composition,” which explores writing pedagogy as intellectual fun, emergence, and joy. Her teaching foregrounds curiosity, experimentation, and student engagement.
Harry Clark Memorial English Department TA Excellence Award
Erin Miller
Erin Miller (Literary Studies PhD student) received the Harry Clark Memorial English Department TA Excellence Award, which goes to a department nominee for a campus‑wide award who did not receive the campus‑wide recognition but whose teaching is exemplary. Across nine semesters teaching English 100 and English 201, Miller has designed engaging, real‑world learning experiences that prompt students to think about the intersections between accessibility, inclusion, and rhetoric on campus and in the broader community.
Miller’s syllabi and course projects show a deep commitment to helping students understand UW–Madison as an institution with limitations but also possibilities. David Zimmerman highlights projects in which students analyzed accessibility around Bascom Hill and rewrote land acknowledgment statements to better reflect relationships with the Ho‑Chunk people. Colleagues consistently note her adaptability and ability to foster productive discussions. One student described her as “a student’s teacher,” a phrase Zimmerman says “captures the kind of instructor we all aspire to be.”
Writing Center TA Teaching Awards
Sydney Goggins and Helen Smith
Each year, The Writing Center TA Teaching Awards recognize two teaching assistants each year for excellence in one‑to‑one writing instruction and contributions to Writing Center programming. More than thirty‑five teaching assistants provide personalized, one‑to‑one writing instruction to over 1,500 students, lead writing groups, present workshops, and conduct campus‑wide outreach initiatives.
This year’s Writing Center TA Teaching Awards recognize the contributions of Sydney Goggins(Composition and Rhetoric PhD student) and Helen Smith (Literary Studies PhD student). Their applications demonstrated strong teaching philosophies and clear evidence of instructional strengths, reflecting the Writing Center’s mission of individualized, student‑centered writing support.
English 100 TA Awards
Jagravi Dave and Evangeline Thurston Wilder
The English 100 TA Awards recognize two teaching assistants whose work over the academic year has been outstanding in their support of students, course design, responsive activities and assignments, and participation in the program’s professional development. The awards particularly honor attention to students, quality of feedback and advice, and impact on students’ learning and development as writers.
Jagravi Dave (Literary Studies PhD student) was nominated by two students, a notable achievement given how difficult it can be to secure student nominations. Students highlighted her passion for teaching, responsiveness to student needs and concerns, constructive feedback, hard work on behalf of her students, and patience and understanding. She also contributed to a professional development workgroup focused on assessment and portfolio grading.
Evangeline Thurston Wilder (Literary Studies PhD student) was nominated by a colleague and received excellent student evaluations. Her colleague was impressed by her energy and innovative, student‑centered class design. In reflecting on her nomination, Wilder described the “Evangeline Shut Up challenge,” in which she stepped back and students stepped up to run the class and lesson themselves. In her class, she has integrated questions about technology, the future, and the work of writing. In her workgroup this spring, she explored how to use a shared fiction text rhetorically in a composition classroom.
Undergraduate student awards
Writing prizes
John McMynn Williams Senior Thesis Award
Eeshan Chakrabarti
Thesis: Reticence as Affect in Three Contemporary Poets
The John McMynn Williams Senior Thesis Award is given to one student for a senior thesis chapter that demonstrates exceptional writing and analytical skills. Literary Studies major Eeshan Chakrabarti’s thesis, Reticence as Affect in Three Contemporary Poets, examines the work of James Merrill, John Ashbery, and Elizabeth Bishop. Professor Timothy Yu describes Chakrabarti as “a brilliant writer and an insightful reader of poetry,” noting his “remarkable ability to seize the reader’s attention and to vividly characterize what is distinctive in a poet’s work.” Yu highlights one elegant formulation in which Chakrabarti turns Wordsworth on his head, describing Merrill as a poet for whom “Poetry is tranquility recollected in emotion.” Yu writes, “It’s been a privilege to work with him on this project.”
William F. Vilas Prizes
These prizes, established by Anna M. Vilas in 1912, are awarded each year for the two best expository essays written by undergraduates in an upper‑level English course.
Claire Orlikowski
Essay: A Well‑Known Hoodoo Doctor… And a Catholic: Critical Examination of Folk Religion in Zora Neale Hurston’s Mules and Men
Professor Raquel Kennon mentions that Claire Orlikowski’s final research paper for ENGL 461, “A Well‑Known Hoodoo Doctor… And A Catholic: Critical Examination of Folk Religion in Zora Neale Hurston’s Mules and Men”, “explores Hurston’s representation of syncretic religious practices in her 1935 anthropology book on the U.S. South.” Kennon notes that Orlikowski “adeptly reviews various critical turns within Mules and Men scholarship with a focus on the last twenty‑five years” and explains that “Hurston does not treat the blending of mainstream Christianity with voodoo and hoodoo as anything out of the ordinary, something that is due to her own views on religion.” Kennon calls Claire’s argument about the “revolutionary” aspects of the book “clear and convincing,” observing that Hurston does not strain to validate or justify the syncretic beliefs of the people she observes: “they simply are.” Kennon adds that Orlikowski’s engagement in class discussion “was always thoughtful and pushed forward our thinking about Hurston’s texts in meaningful ways.”
Xining Liu
Essay: Crip Cyborgs: Disability, Embodiment, and the Prosthetic Future in Cyberpunk
Professor Frederic Neyrat writes that through an analysis of the tabletop role‑playing game Cyberpunk, Xining Liu’s essay “rethinks the category of cyborg, no longer just as a challenge to the divisions between genders (D. Haraway) or the relationship between robots and humans (P.K. Dick), but also the division between able‑bodied and disabled bodies.” By examining contemporary technology and drawing on Susan Wendell’s The Rejected Body, Liu shows that the cyborg‑like bodies of Cyberpunk “literalize what phenomenology and disability studies already insist upon: that the subject is never a dis‑embodied consciousness, but a being constituted through vulnerable, passable, and modifiable physical body.”
McMynn Williams Creative Media Prize
Landis Varughese
Project: The Island (podcast) Instructor: Timothy Yu
The McMynn Williams Creative Media Prize recognizes the outstanding use of creative media to express ideas in unique ways, re‑imagine the work of English studies, and take advantage of the affordances of emerging media. Professor Timothy Yu writes that Landis Varughese’s podcast, The Island, created as a final project for his course on Asian American graphic novels, was “probably the most professional‑sounding and accomplished” student podcast he has heard, “right down to the musical cues.” Yu notes that the podcast “offered a wonderful venue for a thoughtful and engaging discussion of three texts from the course, revealing the limits of standard ‘caught between worlds’ or ‘cultural conflict’ narratives about Asian Americans.”
James T. Lewis Prizes
Established in 1968, these prizes are awarded annually for the two best essays written by first‑year students in an English Department course.
Ali Alkaabi
Essay: From Burden to Honor
Ali Alkaabi’s essay From Burden to Honor exemplifies the strong analytical writing and engagement with course material that the James T. Lewis Prizes are designed to recognize.
Julia Vance
Essay: The Indoctrination and Objectification that Have Led to the Systemic Barriers that Non‑Human Animals Faced from Law to Literature
Julia Vance’s essay, The Indoctrination and Objectification that Have Led to the Systemic Barriers that Non‑Human Animals Faced from Law to Literature, meets the James T. Lewis Prize criteria for first‑year writing by offering a sustained, critical examination of systemic barriers facing non‑human animals across legal and literary contexts in an English Department course.
Standish Henning Shakespeare Prize
Nate Mason
Essay: A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Towards a Holistic Feminist Interpretation
The Standish Henning Shakespeare Prize, established in recognition of Professor Standish Henning, is awarded for the best essay written by an undergraduate in an upper‑level Shakespeare course. Professor Joseph Bowling writes that in his “brilliant and ambitious essay ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Towards a Holistic Feminist Interpretation,’ Nate Mason reconstructs the gender system internal to Shakespeare’s famous romantic comedy in order to lay bare its disciplining logic: from the opening to the closing scene the female characters of A Midsummer Night’s Dream undergo a ‘straightening’ process each being readied for (or, in the case of Titania, chastised into) normative heterosexual marriage.” Bowling calls the essay “exemplary in its deployment of careful, attentive close readings to excavate the play’s dramatization of the play’s compulsory heterosexual imperative.”
McMynn Williams Data Analysis Prize
Jai Deans
Essay: Disability and Writing Pedagogy: An Analysis of Accessibility in Tutoring Writing Spaces
The McMynn Williams Data Analysis Prize is awarded for an outstanding written project based on the collection and analysis of original data in an upper‑level English course. Professor Johs Rasmussen writes that “Jai Deans was a gift to the English 403 classroom,” always prepared to engage in thoughtful dialogues about the histories and practices that shape critical attitudes toward writing today. Deans’s research paper, “Disability and Writing Pedagogy: An Analysis of Accessibility in Tutoring Writing Spaces,” argues that contemporary writing instruction “still suffer[s] from, as they writes, ‘a limited view of disability… that does not account for the flexible nature of flexibility and how it manifests in various ways that are not always outwardly perceivable.’” Rasmussen notes that the project “demonstrated Jai’s capacity to sift through primary and secondary materials to draw perceptive conclusions that both challenge and contribute to existing paradigms of knowledge.”
Scholarships and awards
Helen C. White Award
Ella Olson and Han Raschka
The Helen C. White Award is presented to senior students majoring in the humanities who exemplify the sterling character of Helen C. White, a great teacher and scholar in the Department of English. Recipients are selected on the basis of academic standing and a deep interest in the life of the community, including sharing their humanistic culture with families and communities. This year’s award recognizes Ella Olson and Han Raschka.
Dorothy Classen Urish Scholarship
Asher Moriarty
The Dorothy Classen Urish Scholarship was established by former English major Jack Urish in honor of his mother Dorothy, an English teacher in Stoughton, Wisconsin. The scholarship offers financial support toward the academic success of a senior English major. This year’s recipient is Asher Moriarty.
Helen Black Bennett Memorial Scholarship
Han Raschka
The Helen Black Bennett Memorial Scholarship, established in 1994 by Penelope G. Sticha in honor of her mother, recognizes undergraduate English majors for their academic achievement. This year’s recipient is Han Raschka.
Felice Levin Michaels Scholarship
Claire Orlikowski
The Felice Levin Michaels Scholarship provides scholarships to undergraduate students in the Department of English. This year’s recipient is Claire Orlikowski.
English Undergraduate Scholarships
Lorelei Dittl and Grace Melstrand
Thanks to the generosity of Thomas Johnson ’73 and Barbara Johnson, the English Department has provided scholarships to students through this fund since 2014. These scholarships offer financial assistance to deserving undergraduate English majors. This year’s recipients are Lorelei Dittl and Grace Melstrand.
Mary Brabyn Wackman Scholarships
Emma Anderson and Angel Chao
The Mary Brabyn Wackman Scholarships were established by Charline M. Wackman, a 1961 graduate of the University of Wisconsin, in honor of her mother. Awards are based on academic merit and given to English majors who are Wisconsin residents. This year’s recipients are Emma Anderson and Angel Chao.
Vivian Mowry English Scholarships
Evan Randle
The Vivian Mowry English Scholarships are funded through a trust established in 1963 by Vivian Mowry, a 1910 graduate of the University of Wisconsin. Awards are made to English majors on the basis of scholastic proficiency and active participation in campus activities. This year’s recipient is Evan Randle.
McMynn Williams First‑Generation College Student Scholarship
Landis Varughese
The McMynn Williams First‑Generation College Student Scholarship recognizes the strength, commitment, and perspective of first‑generation English majors. Awarded on the basis of academic merit and an appreciation of the contributions first‑generation students make in the classroom, the department, the university, and the wider community, this year’s scholarship goes to Landis Varughese.
Lila Hicks Furber Scholarship
Ella Olson
The Lila Hicks Furber Scholarship was established in 1995 by Lila Hicks Furber, who graduated with a degree in English from UW–Madison in 1926 and went on to become a teacher. This scholarship supports undergraduate English majors. This year’s recipient is Ella Olson.
Jeffrey Allen Steele Memorial Scholarship
Peyton Hennig
The Jeffrey Allen Steele Memorial Scholarship was established in 2018 by Jocelyn Riley to honor the memory of her husband, Professor Jeffrey Allen Steele, who loved teaching and focused his research on American literature, particularly Margaret Fuller. The scholarship assists accomplished undergraduate students enrolled in the Department of English, with preference for those studying American literature. This year’s recipient is Peyton Hennig.
Cyrena Pondrom Scholarship
Jai Deans
The Cyrena Pondrom Scholarship was established by alumna Julie Bogle, who studied modern English literature with Professor Cyrena Pondrom and completed an independent study on Virginia Woolf that she describes as transformative. Bogle, herself a former recipient of the Mary Brabyn Wackman Scholarship, created this award to provide similar opportunities to young English majors and to honor Pondrom’s influence on her future. This year’s recipient is Jai Deans.
Patricia Joan Allen Scholarship
Matthew Pennington
The Patricia Joan Allen Scholarship is given to an undergraduate student in the Department with a demonstrated interest and academic focus in the study of literature and an understanding that literature has importance beyond academic study. Preference is given to students who share their appreciation for literature with the larger community on campus or through outreach beyond campus. This year’s recipient is Matthew Pennington.