CLA Distinguished Awards
Distinguished Dissertation Award (DDA)
Winners of the CLA Distinguished Dissertation Award are chosen from nominations among the 10 existing CLA departments, and reviewed by faculty across the college. The CLA Doctoral Dissertation Awards recognize outstanding scholarship, impact, and innovation. Each award is for $500 and includes an engraved plaque.
2020 Winners of the CLA Distinguished Dissertation Award
Adrian McClure - Adrian McClure grew up locally in West Lafayette, Indiana, and attended Purdue for both college and graduate school. His dissertation, “Haunted by Heresy: The Perlesvaus, Medieval Antisemitism, and the Trauma of the Albigensian Crusade,” analyzes the hyper-violent, phantasmagorical Old French Grail romance known as the Perlesvaus as a work of “trauma fiction” encoding a hitherto-unrecognized crisis of religious ethics and identity tied to the brutal onset of internal crusading in the thirteenth century.
Based on close readings and intertextual analysis across several genres, this interdisciplinary study argues that the special circumstances of the massacre-prone Albigensian Crusade against “Cathar” heretics in the heart of Europe caused widespread anxiety that Christians were losing their foundational status vis-à-vis the demonized Jews as the new chosen people of God, thus contributing to the well-documented worsening of antisemitism across Western Europe during this period.
Adrian has delivered papers at major conferences such as the International Congress on Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo, the Modern Language Association, and the Medieval Academy of America. His article “In the Name of Charlemagne, Roland, and Turpin: Reading the Oxford Roland as a Trinitarian Text,” was published last year in Speculum, one of the most prestigious journals in medieval studies.
As an individual on the autistic spectrum, Adrian feels very strongly that much of his academic success is due to the inclusive and supportive environment of the Purdue English Department and the wider Purdue community. He is currently applying for teaching and fellowship positions and is working on turning his dissertation into a book.
Mintao Nie - Mintao received his Ph.D. in Political Science in May 2020. His research interests lie at the intersection of global governance, international law, and judicial politics. His research is published in Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race and Justice System Journal.
His dissertation, “Agents of Recalcitrance: Decentralization and State Compliance with International Human Rights Treaties,” develops and tests a theory of how the power dispersion from the central government to local authorities affects state compliance with international human rights treaties. He conducts cross-national time-series analyses of the impact of governmental decentralization on state compliance with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the United Nations Convention Against Torture.
Additionally, using a rich set of qualitative evidence and original event data, he examines how federalism shapes U.S. policy responses to legal disputes arising from violations of Article 36 of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations before the U.S. Supreme Court and the International Court of Justice. Complementary streams of cross-national and within-country evidence show that a decentralized political structure reduces levels of state compliance with international human rights treaties. These findings reveal local authorities as potentially subversive actors in the development of progressive norms and call for alternative ways to hold local authorities accountable in international legal systems.
Still focusing on the development of human rights norms and policies, Mintao’s most recent research studies human rights organizations’ advocacy activities in international organizations. He uses modern techniques of computational text analysis and social network analysis to investigate human rights organizations’ agenda-setting power and collaborative networks surrounding the Universal Periodic Review at the United Nations.
Distinguished Master’s Thesis Award (DMT)
In recognition of the growing diversity of scholarly and creative outputs at the Master’s level within the College of Liberal Arts, the CLA Distinguished Master’s Thesis Awards were expanded in 2018 to include 3 categories of Master’s Projects Awards: the Master’s Thesis, Master’s Non-Thesis Project and Master’s Creative Work Awards. The CLA Master’s Project Awards recognize high quality scholarship and/or creative work, contribution to the field, and innovative components. Masters Project Award winners are chosen from nominations among the 10 existing CLA departments, as well as interdisciplinary graduate programs, and reviewed by faculty from across the College. Each award is for $250 and, like the DDA, includes an engraved plaque.
2020 Winners of the CLA Distinguished Master's Thesis Award
Reilly Kincaid - Reilly Kincaid studies gender and family in the Sociology department. Her research interests include issues such as divisions of household labor, work-family fit, and intergenerational relationships. Her thesis, titled "Partner-Child Relationship Satisfaction and Marital Satisfaction: Do Impressions Spill Over?" examines how parents’ satisfaction with each other’s relationship with offspring influences marital satisfaction, how this compares to the effect of satisfaction with childcare distributions, and how these processes work differently by gender. This project was supported by the Family Research Grant from Purdue's Center For Families. Prior to joining Purdue, Reilly earned her BA in Psychology from the University of Dayton.
Distinguished Master’s Non-Thesis Award (DMNT)
Winners of the CLA Distinguished Master's Non-Thesis Award are chosen from nominations among the 10 existing CLA departments, and reviewed by faculty across the college. The CLA DMNT Awards recognize outstanding scholarship, impact, and innovation. Each award is for $250 and includes an engraved plaque.
2020 Winners of the CLA Distinguished Master's Non-Thesis Award
Kristen Smole - Kristen is a student in Purdue's Political Science department, specializing in American Politics. She was a TA for the Supreme Court and Constitutional Law course (POL429). She recently contributed to an article titled "Politics, Groups, and Identities and New Pathways to Rep Publishing in Political Science," published in the journal PS: Political Science & Politics. She is currently an Innovation Fellow at enFocus, Inc.
Distinguished Master’s Creative Work Award (DMCW)
Winners of the CLA Distinguished Master's Creative Work Award are chosen from nominations among the 10 existing CLA departments, and reviewed by faculty across the college. The CLA DMCW Awards recognize outstanding creativity, impact, and innovation. This award includes original works accepted by the university "in lieu of thesis" - including non-thesis papers, compositions, published books, works of art, computer software, et cetera. Each award is for $250 and includes an engraved plaque.
2020 Winners of the CLA Distinguished Master's Creative Work Award
Jennifer Loyd - Jennifer Loyd completed a Master’s degree of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at Purdue University, where she served as Managing Editor for the Sycamore Review and taught composition and creative writing. Her poems and prose, which explore the intersection between the private voice and public narratives, have appeared in The Southern Review, Prairie Schooner, Natural Bridge, New South, and Colorado Gardener. She is a 2020/2021 Stadler Fellow at Bucknell University.