English Literature Bachelor’s dissertations
Since 2010-2011, the English Literature section of the Department of Literary Studies has awarded an annual prize to the best BA paper in the field of English literature at Ghent University. The prize, a book voucher with a cash value of 50 EUR, was generously sponsored by J. Story-Scientia until 2014 and Boekhandel Limerick from 2015 to 2018. From 2018-2019 onwards, Paard van Troje will be sponsoring the award.
The winning BA paper and the runners-up are published below in PDF format. Intended as a reward for the efforts of the students concerned and as inspiration for their successors, the award and the online publication round off the English Literature seminar, a preparatory course for the BA paper that simulates the process of conceiving, researching, and writing a scholarly article.
2024-2025
Amber Anseeuw, was declared the winner for the 2024-25 academic year and received her prize in September 2025.
- Amber Anseeuw, “‘Flesh of My Flesh, Blood of My Blood’: Monstrous Motherhood and Menstrual Pathology in Bram Stoker’s Dracula” (Supervisor: Dr. Louise Benson James)
2023-2024
Lieselot Tant, Paulien Vercruysse and Jamie Vyvey were declared joint winners for the 2023-2024 academic year and received their prizes in October 2024.
- Lieselot Tant, “Raising the Bar, Lowering the Stool: How Comedians in the 21st Century are Reshaping Stand-Up Standards” (Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Andrew Bricker)
- Paulien Vercruysse, “Belonging to Another Race of Beings’: Depictions of Fallenness in Gaskell’s Ruth and Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles” (Supervisor: Dr. Eloïse Forestier)
- Jamie Vyvey , “Clawing at Narratives: Challenging Traditional Animal Representations through Haruki Murakami’s Feline Portrayals” (Supervisor: Dr. Shannon Lambert)
2022-2023
Lucie Detaille and Camille van Pottelsberghe were declared joint winners for the 2022-2023 academic year and received their prizes in September 2023.
- Lucie Detaille, “Telling a Story You Don’t Have the Language For: Exploring Queer Abuse and (Mis)citation in Carmen Maria Machado’s Memoir In the Dream House” (Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Gert Buelens)
- Camille van Pottelsberghe de la Potterie, “Among Fallen Women, New Women and New Men: An Exploration of Changing Gender Stereotypes in the 18th and 19th Century” (Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Elizabeth Amann)
2021-2022
Beau Serrus was declared the winner for the 2021-2022 academic year and received the prize in September 2022.
- Beau Serrus, “‘Demons of Wickedness’: Deconstructed Childhood Innocence in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse” (supervisor: Dr. Cedric Van Dijck)
2020-2021
Maurane Pieters and Cato Rooryck were declared joint winners for the 2020-2021 academic year and received their prizes in October 2021.
- Maurane Pieters for “Looking for Absence: Pandemic Depictions and Calamity Form in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse” (supervisor: Prof. Dr. Marco Caracciolo)
- Cato Rooryck, “‘I will be free / even to the uttermost as I please in words’: The Power of Language and the Battle of the Sexes in The Taming of the Shrew, Romeo and Juliet, and Much Ado About Nothing” (supervisor: Prof. Dr. Andrew Bricker)
2019-2020
Nina Waegemans and Jena Osselaer were declared joint winners for the 2019-2020 academic year and received their prizes in September 2020.
- Nina Waegemans, “Understanding Rupi Kaur’s Instapoetry as an Expression of Online and Celebrity Feminism” (supervisor: Prof. Dr. Delphine Munos)
- Jena Osselaer, “In Search of Female Identity through the Death-and-Rebirth Pattern in Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar and Ariel” (supervisor: Prof. Dr. Johanna Wagner)
2018-2019
Flora Van Canneyt was declared the winner for the 2018-19 academic year and received the prize in March 2019.
- Flora Van Canneyt, “Act Natural: Metadrama and Theories on Play-Acting in Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” (supervisor: Prof. Dr. Guido Latré)
2017-2018
Vanessa Van Puyvelde was declared the winner for the 2017-18 academic year and received the prize in February 2019.
- Vanessa Van Puyvelde, “Mary Wollstonecraft and the English Jacobin Novel: Politics, Gender, and Sentimentalism in Mary Wollstonecraft’s The Wrongs of Woman (1798)” (supervisor: Dr. Koenraad Claes)
2016-2017
Eline Vandewalle was declared the winner for the 2016-2017 academic year and received the prize in February 2018.
- Eline Vandewalle, “Female Education in Maria Edgeworth’s Novel Belinda” (supervisor: Prof. Dr. Marysa Demoor)
2015-2016
Tine Kempenaers was declared the winner for the 2015-2016 academic year and received the prize in November 2016.
- Tine Kempenaers, “Imagined Pasts: Magical Realism and Historiography in Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion and Sexing the Cherry” (Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Tobi Smethurst)
2014-2015
Bert Biesbrouck and Stephanie Van Renterghem were declared the joint winners for the 2014-2015 academic year and received the prize in May 2016.
- Bert Biesbrouck, “Horrors of the Mariner and His Author: Boundary-Crossing and the Traumatized Mariner’s Unreliable Testimony in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (supervisor: Prof. Dr. Marysa Demoor)
- Florine De Keyser, “Sassoon’s Anti-War Perspectives in Contrast to Civilian Poets” (supervisor: Prof. Dr. Marysa Demoor)
- Stephanie Van Renterghem, “Gothic Representations of Women in Ann Radcliffe and Nathaniel Hawthorne” (supervisor: Dr. Gero Guttzeit)
2013-2014
Mahlu Mertens was declared the winner for the 2013-2014 academic year and received the prize during the first class meeting of the English Literature seminar in February 2015.
- Esther De Baecke, “Aestheticism in Oscar Wilde’s Fairy Tales” (supervisor: Prof. Dr. Koenraad Claes)
- Matthias De Groeve, “Reflections of War in John Buchan’s Fiction” (supervisor: Dr. Kate Macdonald)
- Lenore Lampens, “Individualism in Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis and B. F. Skinner’s Walden Two” (supervisor: Dr. Marius Hentea)
- Mahlu Mertens, “Mnemonic Dramaturgy in Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie” (supervisor: Dr. Sarah Posman)
2012-2013
Simon De Craemer, Meike Meulebrouck, and Michelle Verdonck were declared the joint winners for the 2013-2014 academic year and received the prize during the first class meeting of the English Literature seminar in February 2014.
- Simon De Craemer, “‘The Cold Iron of Their Sloped Iron’: Technology in David Jones’s In Parenthesis” (supervisor: Prof. Dr. Marysa Demoor)
- Thomas Denys, “Black Magic in Books I and II of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene” (supervisor: Prof. Dr. Sandro Jung)
- Meike Meulebrouck, “Freud’s Death Instinct in D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love” (supervisor: Dr. Birgit Van Puymbrouck)
- Caroline Van Thienen, “The Depiction of Women in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and Macbeth” (supervisor: Dr. Lisa Walters)
- Sophie Verbeke, “Jane Eyre as a Reaction to the Limited Views of Victorian Society on Femininity” (supervisor: Dr. Marianne Van Remoortel)
- Michelle Verdonck, “The Perception of Evil and Desire in the Gothic Verse of Anne Bannerman and Sarah Pearson” (supervisor: Prof. Dr. Sandro Jung)
2011-2012
Maarten Luyten was declared the winner for the 2011-2012 academic year and received the prize during the first class meeting of the English Literature seminar in February 2013.
- Maarten Luyten, “The Beat Generation’s Influence on Rock and Roll” (supervisor: Ms. Debora Van Durme)
- Anouk Mouton, “The Stupidest Tea-Party Ever: Non-Conformism in ‘A Mad Tea-Party‘” (supervisor: Dr. Marianne Van Remoortel)
- Jonathan Van Cappellen, “Evelyn Waugh’s ‘A Handful of Dust’ and the Crisis of the Subject in Modernist Literature” (supervisor: Dr. Marius Hentea)
- Jens Van Gheluwe, “‘Strange times to be a Jew’: An Analysis of Jewish Identity in Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union” (supervisor: Prof. Dr. Philippe Codde)
2010-2011
Alexandra Cousy was declared the winner for the 2010-2011 academic year and received the prize during the English Literature info session for BA3 students on 5 October 2011.
- Sean Bex, “Charles Dickens: Judge and Partaker of Victorian Commercialism” (supervisor: Prof. Dr. Gert Buelens; co-supervisor: Mr. Jasper Schelstraete)
- Sophie Coolsaet, “Paratexts and Their Influence on Interpretation: On the Importance of the Final Chapter of Anthony Burgess‟s A Clockwork Orange” (supervisor: dr. Yuri Cowan)
- Alexandra Cousy, “The Descent into Hell in the Poetry of Eavan Boland” (supervisor: Prof. Dr. Stef Craps)
- Bjorn Delbeecke, John Milton: The Religious Economics of Paradise Lost” (supervisor: Prof. Dr. Sandro Jung)
- Hannah Eeckhout, “Investigating the Ambiguities and Contradictions in the Representation of Female Same-Sex Desire in Eighteenth-Century Erotica, Particularly Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure” (supervisor: Prof. Dr. Gert Buelens; co-supervisor: Prof. Dr. Sandro Jung)
- Sarah Malfait, “The Representation of the Public School in the Boy’s Own Paper and Chums ” (supervisor: dr. Yuri Cowan; co-supervisor: prof. dr. Marysa Demoor)
- Sean Wille, “Ambiguity in the Works of John Keats: A Comparative Study of the Setting, the Characters and the Female in La Belle Dame sans Merci and Lamia” (supervisor: Prof. Dr. Sandro Jung; co-supervisor: Dr. Sören Hammerschmidt)