The John J. Winkler Memorial Trust invites all undergraduate and graduate students in North America (plus those currently unenrolled who have not as yet received a doctorate and who have never held a regular academic appointment) to enter the 33rd competition for the John J. Winkler memorial prize. This year the Prize will be a cash award of $2,000, which may be split if more than one winner is chosen.
The Prize is intended to honor the memory of John J. (“Jack”) Winkler, a classical scholar, teacher, and political activist for radical causes both within and outside the academy, who died of AIDS in 1990 at the age of 46. Jack believed that the profession as a whole discourages young scholars from exploring neglected or disreputable topics and from applying unconventional or innovative methods to their scholarship. He wished to be remembered by means of an annual prize that would encourage such efforts.
In accordance with his wishes, the John J. Winkler Memorial trust awards a cash prize each year to the author of the best undergraduate or graduate essay in any risky or marginal field of classical studies. Topics include (but are not limited to) those that Jack himself explored: the ancient novel, the sex/gender systems of antiquity, the social meanings of Greek drama, and ancient Mediterranean culture and society. Approaches include (but are not limited to) those that Jack’s own work exemplified: feminism, anthropology, narratology, semiotics, cultural studies, ethnic studies, and lesbian/gay studies.
| Year | Name | Essay Title |
|---|---|---|
| 1991 | Kirk Ormand | The Use and Abuse of Ariadne, 55BCE-1984CE |
| 1992 | Denise McCoskey | Is there a ‘Thesmophoria’ in This Text? Women’s Spheres in Aristophanes’ Ecclesiazousae and Thesmophoriazousae |
| 1993 | John Ma | Black Hunter Variations |
| 1994 | Shane Butler | (Un)Masking ‘The Greek Miracle’: Performativity in Fifth and Fourth Century Athens |
| 1995 | Sara Lindheim | Setting Her Straight: Ovid Re-Presents Sappho |
| 1995 | Christopher Spelman | Marriage and Ideology in Catullus |
| 1996 | Mark Buchan | Penelope as Parthenos |
| 1997 | Tamara Chin | Mapping the Scythians: Anti-nomad techniques in Herodotus and Niebuhr |
| 2002 | Tamara Chin | Compulsory Heterotextuality: Sappho (31) meets Shijing [Book of Songs] (1) |
| 2003 | Mary Frances Brown | Medusa’s Eyes: Gender, Subjectivity, and Ekphrasis in Ovid’s Metamorphoses |
| 2003 | Jennifer Benedict | The Matrix of Identity: Gender and Representation in the Works of Lucian |
| 2004 | Brooke Holmes | Catachreses: Epic Pain and the Wound of Agamemnon |
| 2004 | Lyra Monteiro | Colonial Origins: New Approaches to History, Archaeology, and Ethnicity at Metapontum |
| 2005 | Marianne Hopman | From Devouring Monster to Femme Fatale: Scylla in the Greek and Roman Imagination |
| 2005 | (Name Withheld on Request) | ‘Beastly Obscenity’ and the Serious Irrumator |
| 2006 | James Uden | A Virgin Martyr and a Phallic Prayer: New Connections in the Elegies of Maximianus |
| 2006 | Taylor Coughlan | The Voice Which Is Not One: Narrative, Intertext, and Gender in Metamorphoses 4.274-415 |
| 2007 | Alex Dressler | The Sophist and the Swarm: Platonism and Feminism in Achilles Tatius |
| 2007 | Michael Pelch | The Dangers of Drag in Aristophanes’ Thesmophoriazousae |
| 2008 | Danielle Meinrath | A Narrative of Enslavement? Re-reading Photis in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses |
| 2008 | Alison Fields | Lucian’s Megilla/us: Rethinking Gender, Agency, and Same-Sex Relationships |
| 2009 | Stephen Kidd | Forging The 300: Muscles/Muscle Armor in Ancient Greece/Today |
| 2009 | Geoff Benson | Archimedes’ Cattle of the Sun and the Limits of Euhemerism (Honorable Mention) |
| 2010 | Cameron Fitzsimmons | Dignitas Servilis: The Subjectivity of Male Slaves in Plautus |
| 2010 | Anne Doering | Elemental Bodies: Female Self-image and the Elements |
| 2011 | Sarah Olsen | Maculate Conception: Unraveling the Sexual and Romantic Discourse of Heliodorus’ Aithiopica |
| 2011 | Joseph Dexter | A.R. Gurney’s Jewish Antigone |
| 2012 | Donna Zuckerberg | The morphê of Menelaus in Euripides’ Helen |
| 2012 | Joseph Rosenthal | Androgyny as Liminality: Achilles’ Gender Crossing in the Iliad |
| 2012 | Amanda Krause | Mansura dabo monimenta per aevum: The Metamorphoses as Museum (Honorable Mention) |
| 2013 | Jay Oliver | Mater amissa: The lost Amazon in Seneca’s Phaedra |
| 2014 | Brian McPhee | A Puer’s Horror, Heroism, and Humor: An Interpretation of Pseudolus III.1 |
| 2014 | Tom Sapsford | The Wages of Effeminacy?: Kinaidoi in Egyptian Documentary Sources (Honorable Mention) |
| 2015 | J. Andrew Wein | Ovid’s Trash: Philomela and the Rape-Revenge Film |
| 2016 | Jessica Wright | The Care of the Brain in Early Christianity |
| 2016 | Sarah Harper | A World of Mirrors (or Mirages): Magical Realism in Apuleius’s Metamorphoses |
| 2017 | Debby Sneed | Ten Fingers and Ten Toes: The Fate of Deformed Infants in Ancient Greece |
| 2018 | Chiara Graf | Seneca’s Ugly Feelings |
| 2018 | Meghan Poplacean | Iphigenia at Brauron: Death, Childbirth and Trauma in Classical Greece (Honorable Mention) |
| 2019 | Joseph Gerbasi | Philosophy’s Desire: A Lacanian Reading of Plato’s Republic |
| 2020 | Alexanda Schultz | A Sister’s Song? Female Agency and Community in Sappho’s Brothers Poem |
| 2020 | Paul Johnston | Charmides and the (homo)erotic-aesthetic life: Plato, Wilde and Cavafy (Honorable Mention) |
| 2020 | Ellis Jaewon Yeo | Love’s Grief Work: Reading Ancient Greece in the AIDS Elegies of James Merrill |
| 2021 | Kelly Nguyen | Queering Telemachus: Ocean Vuong, Postmemories and the Vietnam War |
| 2021 | Yanxiao He | Apama, Stratonice, and Antiochus I: Gender and Empire in the Early Hellenistic Period (Honorable Mention) |
| 2022 | Cat Lambert | Lucian’s Queer Book User in the Adversus Indoctum |
| 2022 | Tuhin Bhattacharjee | I Killed my Mother: Or, When Orestes Bumped into Paraśurāma (Honorable Mention) |
| 2022 | Gabriel Ashe-Jones | Borrowed Womanhood: A Transgender Reading of Catullus 63 |
| 2023 | Izzy Levy | Poetic World-Building, Queer Ephemerality, and Sapphic Memory Work: Fragment 94 and Eloise Klein Healy’s The Islands Project: Poems for Sappho |
| 2024 | Carissa Chappell | Leaving No Trace: Reading the Asexual Possibility in Leucippe and Cleitophon |
| 2025 | Thu Truong | Ocean Vuong, Intertextuality, and the Limits of Interpretation |
| 2025 | Kit Pyne-Jaeger | Something Got Out from Inside the Story: Iphigenia’s Sacrifice and the Incontinent Architecture of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon (Honorable Mention) |
| 2026 | Rachel Rucker | Ismene’s Queer Sisterhood (Graduate) |
| 2026 | Olivia Ma | Forms of Distance in Historical Inquiry: Travel, Reflection, and Critical Perspectives (Undergraduate) |
The 2027 Winkler Prize Competition
The winner of the 2027 Prize will be selected from among the contestants by a jury of four (not yet named).
The deadline for submissions will be in Spring 2027. Essays should not exceed a length of 30 pages, including notes but excluding bibliography and illustrations or figures. Text should be double-spaced; notes may be single-spaced. Electronic submission is required. Essays should be sent in PDF format.
The preferred method of submission is by Qualtrics form, available as of October of 2026. The Qualtrics form will allow you to upload your paper directly.
If you are unable to use the Qualtrics form, you may send in your essay by email to James Uden. Please include with your essay the following information: your college/university, your department or program of study, whether you are a graduate or undergraduate, your email and regular mail addresses, a phone number where you can be reached in May 2027, and the title of your work.
The Winkler Prize is intended to encourage new work rather than to recognize scholarship that has already proven itself in more traditional venues. Essays submitted for the prize should not, therefore, be previously published or accepted for publication. Exceptions may be made in the case of anticipated publication in a conference proceeding.
The Trust reserves the right not to confer the Winkler Prize in any year in which the essays submitted to the competition are judged insufficiently prizeworthy.
Contestants may address any inquiries to James Uden, Department of Classics, Yale University.
Winners of the 2026 Winkler Prize
The winners of the 2026 Winkler Memorial Prize are Rachel Rucker, a graduate student at the University of Iowa, for the essay “Ismene’s Queer Sisterhood,” and Olivia Ma, an undergraduate at Harvard, for the essay “Forms of Distance in Historical Inquiry: Travel, Reflection, and Critical Perspectives.”
Supporting the Prize
The John J. Winkler Memorial Trust was established as an independent, charitable foundation on June 1, 1990. Its purpose is to honor Jack Winkler’s memory and to promote both his scholarly and his political ideals. Inquiries about the Winkler Prize and general correspondence may be addressed to James Uden, Department of Classics, Yale University.
The ongoing vitality of the John J. Winkler Memorial Prize depends on the generosity of colleagues, prizewinners, and the wider Classics community. If you would like to celebrate the memory of Jack Winkler and support intellectual work pushing at the boundaries of the field, please consider supporting our work. Checks should be made out to the John J. Winkler Trust and mailed to the Trustee, David M. Halperin, who may be contracted by email for an exact postal address.