Vilém Mathesius Award

The Vilém Mathesius Awards for the best MA and BA theses are awarded every year by the Vilém Mathesius Foundation for the Promotion of English and American Studies in Prague (Nadační fond Viléma Mathesia pro rozvoj anglo-amerických studií v Praze).

The Foundation was established in 1992 when the Department of English and American Studies received a gift from its then students. This foundation (IČO 45251789, address: nám.Jana Palacha 2, Prague 1) was named after the founder of English studies in Czechoslovakia and the first professor of this subject at the Charles University, Vilém Mathesius (1882-1945). The purpose of the foundation is to finance activities contributing to the development of English and American studies which cannot financially supported by the university.

Such activities include the annual Vilém Mathesius awards for the best BA and MA theses. The awards for MA theses consist in a diploma and a cash prize. The authors of the best BA theses are presented with a diploma and with a material reward (book) according to the financial possibilities of the foundation.

The Vilém Mathesius Foundation is delighted to announce that on 22 December 2015, it became the recipient of a generous donation by Professor Martin Hilský, intended primarily for the acknowledgment of the best doctoral dissertations completed at the Department of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures and the Department of the English Language and ELT Methodology.

The donor perceives his donation as a form of paying back the debt owed to the students of English and American Studies, whose magnanimous donation of funds to the Department of English and American studies after November 1989 facilitated the establishment of The Vilém Mathesius Foundation itself. In the words of Professor Hilský, the donation represents "a very modest attempt at a contribution to the continuity of good will and to the invisible network of good which, he is convinced, exists."
 

List of the award-winning theses in Anglophone literatures

(full list of awards in literature and language since 2000 can be downloaded from this page)

2019

PhD dissertations – Martin Hilský Award: not awarded

MA theses:

1st (shared):

• Zdeněk Polívka, “Between Nostalgia and Pragmatism: Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy”
• Alex Russell, “David Foster Wallace, Technology and the Self"

2nd: not awarded

BA theses:

• Hana Radová, “A Critical Analysis of the Male Protagonists in the Brontë Sisters’ Novels”
• Anna Cranfordová, “Postmodernities in Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49”

James Ragan Prize:

Štěpán Krejčí

2018

PhD dissertations – Martin Hilský Award

• Einat Adar, Absurd Consequences: Beckett and Berkeley

MA theses

• Magdalena Císlerová, Blurring the Lines between Reality and Fiction: Peter Carey’s Engagement with Australian History and Identity

BA theses

• Dominika Kecsöová, “Persephone the Wanderer”: Myth in the Poetry of Contemporary American Women Poets

James Ragan Prize: 

Kristýna Greňová

2017

PhD dissertations – Martin Hilský Award

• Tereza Jiroutová Kynčlová, Chicana Literature: A Feminist Perspective of Gloria Anzaldúa’s Identity Politics
• Stephan Delbos, Behind Enemy Lines: The New American Poetry and the Cold War Anthology Wars

MA theses

• Martina Hrbková, Gender Consciousness and Representation in Virginia Woolf’s Writing in Light of Contemporary Feminism and Gender Theory
• Tereza Novická, The American Dream Machine: Anti-Systemic Fictions of Coover, Thompson, Burroughs, and Acker
• Martin Sedláček, Changing Tendencies in Self-Conscious Narratives: A Contrastive Interpretation

BA theses

• Tomáš Suchánek, Resonance and Self-resonance: Gilles Deleuze’s Involuntary Memory in Marcel Proust and Samuel Beckett

James Ragan Prize: 

Anna Ohlídalová

Photos from the awards ceremony

2016

MA theses

• Františka Zezuláková Schormová, Us and Them: Presenting America 1948-1956
• Kristýna Hoblová, The Reflection of the Exclusion Crisis (1678-83) in Contemporary Literature
• Martin Světlík, The Weekend of Dermot & Grace: Eugene R. Watters’ Long Modernist Poem

BA theses

• Nikol Němcová, Women in the English Drama of the Orient
• Hana Němečková, “Aided Derbforgaill: Recurrent Motifs in the Ulster Cycle and their Relation to the Status of Women
• Jan Zikmund, “Thinking Globally: Seamus Heaney and Dennis O’Driscoll

James Ragan Prize: Aren Ock

2015

MA theses

• 1st prize: Michaela Plicková, The Quest for Identity within the Reality of Plantation Memory in Eudora Welty’s Short Fiction

BA theses

• Magdalena Císlerová, Free of Inhibitions and Full of Pleasure: The Image of Europe in the Works of James Salte
• Vladimír Novák, Grotesque, or Queer? Homosexual Characters in Tennessee Williams’s Selected Short Stories
• Martin Sedláček, Interpreting Narrative Techniques in Moby-Dick
  
• Šárka Tůmová, Reinhold Niebuhr, Christian Realism and the Poetry of W.H. Auden

James Ragan Prize: Anastasija Siljanoska