Schweizer Award, May 2009: Bookshelves for Humanities Building Fourth Floor Lounge

No Schweizer award for best M.A. thesis was awarded in the spring of 2009 because there were no nominations. Bernard & Liang Schweizer instead donated the prize money of $300 to purchase bookshelves for the 4th floor lounge in the Humanities Building--as part of the Humanities Division's ongoing effort to refurbish that space. More info on that project is forthcoming.

The Liang and Bernard Schweizer Thesis Award was created to recognize professional promise and to reward academic excellence and intellectual maturity among the outgoing M.A. students at the LIU-Brooklyn English Department. The Award shall be presented each May at the English Department Awards Ceremony. The first award year was 2008, and the winner was Helen C. Seo, for "Evelyn Waugh: 'Change and Decay in All Around I See'," an interdisciplinary study of Waugh's fiction from a literary critical and media studies perspective.

The prize money is $300, to be paid to the winner by check.

The award shall be given to the most rigorously intellectual, original, and important Master's thesis submitted by an M.A. student during the academic year preceding the award. The award shall be given to a student in the M.A. program, either for a thesis in Literature, in Professional Writing, or in Writing & Rhetoric.

The thesis advisor shall make the nomination on behalf of the student.

The Award Committee shall be composed of three to four judges.

Six weeks prior to the Award Ceremony, Professor Bernard Schweizer will solicit recommendations from all faculty for the best thesis written during the preceding academic year. The recommendations shall be discursive and clearly indicate the strengths of the nominated thesis. A copy of the thesis is to be submitted to Bernard Schweizer together with the recommendation by the set deadline.

The committee of judges shall meet once prior to the last department meeting of the academic year to determine a winner. If there is no natural consensus, a vote shall be taken.

The Liang and Bernard Schweizer Thesis Award shall be given out as long as Bernard Schweizer teaches at Long Island University.

Watch this space for the next call for applications and the announcement of future winner(s)!


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