Seventh Annual Humanities Paper Prize Announcement

Faeli Kathryn Karcher has been named the winner of this year’s Hellenic College Humanities Paper Prize, which is awarded by the Literature and History (LH) program. Faeli, who is majoring in Literature and History (Literature track) and minoring in Education, is expected to graduate in May 2025. Faeli’s paper, “Perfectionist, Revivalist, Extremist: The History of John Noyes and the Oneida Community,” was written in spring 2024 in The Struggle for Identity in the Modern Age (HIST 2165) – a Foundations Forward Core Curriculum course taught by Dr. Nicholas Ganson. Her interest in the subject stemmed in part from having grown up not far from Oneida. In the paper, Faeli draws on an impressive array of primary and scholarly secondary sources to trace the roots of Noyes’ worldview and teachings. She takes into consideration the influence of various ideologies, movements, and religious thinkers of his time, but she also uncovers tendencies that were particular to him and contributed to the distinct phenomenon that was Oneida.    

The prize was established in 2017-18 in order to recognize superlative academic writing within the field of the Humanities. Since that time, there have been five individual recipients and eight winning papers representing the fields of History, Literature, Classics and Theology:

• 2018, Savvas Bournelis, “The Truth of the Sinking of the Lusitania: The British Admiralty and the American Entry into World War I”
• 2019, Carolyn Catherine Holder,“Know Thyself: Mortality and Acceptance of Place as a Way to Self-Knowledge in The Iliad” and “Philology: A Seven Poem Cycle On Discerning Vocation”
• 2020, Christopher Russell, “Glimpsing the Biblical Abraham in Flannery O’Connor: Understanding ‘Parker’s Back’ through Kierkegaard’s Conception of Faith”
• 2021, Christopher Russell, “America’s Response to the Greek Revolution: The Rhetoric of American Philhellenism, 1821-1828”
• 2022, David Karle, “Hand Me Down, Reform Me Not: The Divergent Paths of Eastern and Western Theology in the History of the Reformation”
• 2023, David Karle, “Ornament of the Balkans: Jewish Salonika and the 1913 Annexation to the Kingdom of Greece”
• 2024, Faeli Kathryn Karcher, “Perfectionist, Revivalist, Extremist: The History of John Noyes and the Oneida Community”

All Hellenic College instructors are invited to nominate papers in the Humanities from their courses. The papers are then judged by a prize committee consisting of full-time professors, who serve on the committee on a rotating basis. 

The LH program and the prize committee congratulate all the nominees and eagerly anticipate more outstanding nominations in the 2024-25 academic year.