Duke’s Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Science and Cultural Theory (CISSCT) sponsors an annual “Best Undergraduate Science Studies Senior Thesis” prize. All undergraduate theses written in English and completed between May 9, 2022 and April 30, 2023, in all departments and programs, and which explore a science or sciences from an historical, philosophical, sociological, or literary critical perspective, are eligible for this prize. The entire thesis should be emailed as a .pdf
to elizabeth.apple@duke.edu by no later than May 1, 2023. The prize for the winning thesis is $500, and the thesis itself will be posted in its entirety as a .pdf on the CISSCT website.
Students may submit their senior theses for consideration, or faculty supervising a science-studies senior thesis may nominate their student’s thesis for consideration by sending an email to elizabeth.apple@duke.edu. In either case, the actual submission for this prize should be made directly by the students themselves.
Students recognized with this honor include:
2023 Best Undergraduate Science Studies Senior Thesis: Bailey Griffen, “The ‘Last Midwife’ that Never Was: Gender, Race, and Birth in Durham’s Medical Establishments, 1900-1989"
2022 Best Undergraduate Science Studies Senior Thesis: Cydney Livingston, “Our Seeds Sprouted: The Human Betterment League of North Carolina, 1947-1988"
2021 Best Undergraduate Science Studies Senior Thesis: Caroline Petronis, “Blurring Contagion in the Information Age: How COVID-19 Troubles the Boundaries of the Biomedical and Socioinformatic"
2020 Best Undergraduate Science Studies Senior Thesis: Sandra Luksic, “Wittgenstein Natural Language Processing, and Ethics of Technology"
2020 Honorable Mention: Joel Mire, “Narrative as Search: Computational Forms of Knowledge in the Novels of Tom McCarthy”
2019 Best Undergraduate Science Studies Senior Thesis: Grant Wen, “Hues of Healing: Reconstructing Chinese Immigrant Identity Through Medicine”
2019 Honorable Mention: S. Elizabeth Needham, “Nondum laurus erat: Plants and Empire in Ovid’s Metamorphoses”
2018 Best Undergraduate Science Studies Senior Thesis: Jeremy A. Gottlieb, "Enacting Transgender: An Ethnography of Transgender Ontology in a Pediatric Gender Clinic” (Cultural Anthropology)
2017 Best Undergraduate Science Studies Senior Thesis: Jennifer Acosta, "Objective Subjects, Empirical Identities: Psychology's Measurement of Ethnic Identity and Critical Race and Ethnicity Theory"(Global Cultural Studies in the Literature Program)
2017 Honorable Mentions: Feiyi Kuai, "Breathing In and Shouting Back: Black Lung Disease and Neo-liberalism in China" (Department of Cultural Anthropology) and Indrani Saha, "Being Within: Disruption and Disorientation In Carlos Cruz-Diez's Chromosaturation" (Program II, Cognitive Aesthetics)
2016 Best Undergraduate Science Studies Senior Thesis: Julia Tuttle, "Drug Development for Neglected Tropical Diseases: DNDi and the Product Development Partnership (PDP) Model” (Department of Global Health).
2015 Best Undergraduate Science Studies Senior Thesis: Joseph Wu, "Pluralism and the Levels of Selection in Cancer" (Department of Philosophy).