2024 Essay Contest Winners Announced

We are pleased to announce the winners of JASNA's 2024 Essay Contest and congratulate them on their outstanding work! The winning entries have just been published on our website, and when you read them, we think you will agree that the study and appreciation of Jane Austen is alive and well among the next generation of fans and scholars.

A few fun facts about the contest:

• We received 509 submissions, making 2024 another banner year for the contest. 
• Students from the United States, Canada, and 34 other countries (up from 25 last year) participated, and several countries were represented for the first time: Northern Ireland, Kenya, Argentina, Indonesia, Greece, Mongolia, and Jordan.
• Not all of the participants in the undergraduate and graduate divisions are majoring or seeking advanced degrees in English literature. Among the contest winners this year are students studying art therapy, social work, biochemistry, and mathematics. 

The topic for the 2024 contest was "Jane Austen's Novels: Still Relevant after 200 Years?"; students were asked to debate both sides of the question and attack the claim in the first part of the essay and defend it in the second. The entries were evaluated in two rounds by 33 judges, and the top 3 essays in each division were selected for scholarship awards. First-place winners were also invited to attend this year's Annual General Meeting in Cleveland, Ohio.

The nine students receiving top honors include:

High School Division

•  First Place:  Eva L. Hagen
  Through the Lens of Emma Woodhouse: Are Austen’s Heroines Irrelevant or Inspiring?
•  Second Place:  Lara E. Cratty
  “She wrote them for posterity”: The Endurance of the Austenian Corpus
• Third Place:  Connor H. Cowan
  Putting the Pride in Pride and Prejudice: Joel Kim Booster’s Fire Island as a Proxy for Austen’s Relevance

 College/University Division 

•  First Place:  Rylee Thomas
  On Humor and Rebellion: Jane Austen as a Visionary for Modern-Day Social Change
• Second Place:  Almila Dükel
  “There Is No Enjoyment Like Reading”: Examining Jane Austen’s Relevance Through Her Depictions of Reading
• Third Place:  Mary Helene Marmande
  Mentioned with Consideration for Twenty or Two Hundred Years?

Graduate School Division    

• First Place:  Claire E. Kaiser
  “Impossible to Hate:” How Reading Jane Austen Increases Our Capacity for Empathy
• Second Place:  Amanda M. MacMurtrie
  Endurability, Connection, and Why AI Will Never Convince Me to Read Jane Austen
• Third Place:  Amy R. Eversole
  Antiquated Motifs vs Timeless Wisdom

Congratulations again to our winners, and many thanks to all the contest participants and judges!

JASNA sponsors the Essay Contest each year to foster the study and appreciation of Jane Austen's works in new generations of readers. The 2025 contest topic and rules will be published in November 2024, and we will begin accepting submissions in February 2025.