The Marguerite Peyre Prize
The Marguerite Peyre Prize is awarded to graduate students in recognition of excellence in the thesis or exceptional contributions to the Department, or a combination of qualities of research, teaching, and collegiality.
2025 Marguerite Peyre Prize Recipients:
Walid Bouchakour
Dissertation: “Beyond Emergency: Aesthetics and Politics of the Contemporary Algerian Novel”
Walid Bouchakour’s thesis takes as its point of departure the state of emergency in place in Algeria for nearly two decades, from the beginning of the civil war to the threshold of the Arab Spring. It examines the paradigm of “emergency” in the criticism and reception of contemporary Algerian literature from this period. First, during the first half of the “état d’urgence,” and during the period of the war itself and second, the critique of that state in the decade following the war.
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Abigail Fields
Dissertation: “The Literary Field: Agriculture and the Ecological Imagination in the Nineteenth-Century French Novel”
Abigail Fields’s thesis represents a significant intervention in nineteenth-century French literary and cultural studies, as well as in ecocriticism, particularly as it relates to the history of agriculture in France. The thesis focuses mainly on novels but includes diversions into popular media including newspaper articles, cartoons and other illustrations, and government literature, to show how ideas about labor, the environment, and agriculture developed over the course of the nineteenth century in France.
