2024 DISSERTATION PRIZE WINNERS

Each year we select and award dissertation prizes for outstanding essays written by undergraduate and postgraduate students. Winning and shortlisted essays are assessed on the quality of their originality, research and method, and form and content.

Prize winning essays

We are delighted to announce that Tom Hardwick, York St John University is the winner of the Association for Art History’s 2024 Undergraduate Dissertation Prize for the essay ‘The Re-Materialisation of Art, Reframing Conceptual Art through the Work of Hanne Darboven’.  Hardwick’s dissertation offers a close visual and contextual analysis of Hanne Darboven’s Calendar Drawings that rematerializes conceptual art, showing that it is not inherently opposed to materiality or physical labour. The dissertation also explores Darboven’s position as a woman making art, offering a new awareness of the gendered bias of Conceptual art

We are also delighted to announce that Fergus Bovill (University of Oxford) is the winner of the Association for Art History’s 2023 Postgraduate Dissertation Prize for their essay,  From Medieval to Modern, Fragment to Whole: The Album of Illuminated Manuscript Cuttings and the Breaking, Remaking, and Reimagining of the Medieval Book in the late 18th and 19th Century. This dissertation makes a compelling argument for the need to adopt a fresh perspective on illuminated cuttings albums, advocating for a thorough re-evaluation of these often-overlooked artifacts.

Many congratulations to both Tom and Fergus who were awarded their prizes at the 2025 AAH Annual Conference.

Shortlisted undergraduate dissertations

• Ellis O’Brien (University of York) for the essay “Your lifetime plus ten years”: Establishing the Tattoos of Les Skuse as Art Historical Archives (1950-1960)
• Katy Hilton for the essay (University College London) Botanical Illuminations: Flora and Fauna in Northern European Visual Culture, c.1350-1650

Shortlisted postgraduate dissertations

• Madeleine Woodhouse (University of Sussex), for the essay ‘Blackness and Queerness, an encounter between the bindings of a bleeding identity’
• Lesley Lai Sum Cheung, (University of Manchester) for the essay ‘Curatorship as Postcolonial Resistance: Commemoration in the Nation State and Cultural Diplomacy in the Stateless Diaspora’
• Anna Pratley (Warburg Institute, School of Advanced Studies, University of London), “To be set in her gallery of Beauties”: the Surveillance of the 17th Century Amateur Woman Artist and its Repercussions in the Portrait Miniatures of Susannah Penelope Rosse (1652-1700).  

Assessment and Nominations

The Dissertation Prize is assessed by our Doctoral and Early Career Research (DECR) committee. Many thanks to those on the committee, led by Lavinia Amenduni, who read and shortlisted this year’s submissions. The quality and originality of the essays was extremely high. Many thanks to all who submitted nominations.