The English Department is delighted to announce that two of its students have won Faculty prizes for their remarkable work!

Bruna Paz Schmid received the 2024 Faculty Prize, which rewards an MA thesis of outstanding quality, for her thesis titled “The Computational Pragmatics of Trumpian Misrepresentation: It’s the Context, Stupid!”, written under the supervision of Tit. Prof. Steve Oswald. In this study, Bruna analysed misrepresentation strategies in a corpus of Tweets posted by Donald Trump and used machine learning techniques to train systems to automatically detect misrepresentation in this kind of data. Her research draws on pragmatic theoretical models to improve machine performance, and constitutes a significant step forward in incorporating pragmatic phenomena in natural language processing research, as it allows to factor in contextual cues in the analysis. This work was also accepted at the European Conference on Artificial Intelligence, which took place in Santiago de Compostela in October 2024. We congratulate Bruna for her amazing work and we are extremely happy that she has decided to stay with us, as she has now started to work on her PhD at the department.

Stephanie Allen received the 2024 Prix Vigener, which is awarded for the best doctoral thesis in our Faculty, for her thesis “Workes of darkness”: Obscure poetics in Oxford University tragedy, 1547 – 1603”, written under the supervision of Prof. Elisabeth Dutton. In her work Stephanie engages with the field of early modern academic drama, a field that is often ignored by scholars because of preconceptions that it is difficult, dull, and detached from the mainstream developments of playhouse theatre in which Shakespeare is preeminent. Stephanie’s pioneering thesis engages with the ‘obscurity’ of the works of Oxford playwrights, discerning a number of ways in which they consciously exploit obscurity to guide audience or reader response and encourage learning and reflection: her argument builds on a range of theories of rhetoric that she shows to have been accessible to scholars at the University of Oxford at the time. Her thesis as a whole demonstrates that the plays in question are 'difficult’ by design and are also enriched by humour and playful attention to their sources (far from dull) - and they have an important part to play in our understanding of early modern intellectual and theatrical culture. Many congratulations to Stephanie on her elegant thesis and the highly original research behind it: it makes a major contribution to putting academic drama on the map of dramatic and intellectual history.