2023 Prize for Graduate Student Essay

on East German Cinema

This annual prize, created in commemoration of the 75^th anniversary of the founding of the DEFA Film Studios in 2021, is awarded for the best graduate student paper on East German cinema.

The prize is accompanied by a cash award of $500 from the Founder’s Fund for Student Researchers—established in honor of the DEFA Film Library’s founding director, UMass Professor Emeritus Barton Byg—to help support research into East German cinema. 

Eligibility: US or international graduate students, including recent graduates (since January 1, 2022).

Submissions & Format:

• The winning scholarly essay will demonstrate original and critical analysis, clarity of argument and exposition, and engagement with varied source materials.
• Students may submit their own paper, or they may be nominated by an advisor or professor with the author’s consent. In either case, the submitter should provide an accompanying cover letter, as well as a short author’s CV.  
• Papers may be submitted in either English or German and may not have been published by the time of submission. The manuscript should be 5,500-8,000 words in length (double spaced, Times New Roman, 12 pt), including footnotes/endnotes but excluding bibliography.

This year's deadline for submissions is August 15, 2023. Papers should be submitted to the Committee Chair, Mariana Ivanova (mzivanova@umass.edu). Committee members also include Victoria Rizo Lenshyn (UMass Amherst) and Skyler Arndt-Briggs (UMass Amherst, Emerita).

Award Celebration & Certificate:

The author of the winning paper will be contacted in early September 2023. Should the author be attending the conference, the award will be celebrated at the German Studies Association conference soon thereafter. The essay and recipient will be highlighted in the DEFA Film Library newsletter and website; the committee will also provide feedback on the essay.

Past Awardees:

• 2021: Thomas Preston (Columbia University), for his paper "Loneliness and Pathos in Heiner Carow's Coming Out"
• 2022: Mor Geller (The Hebrew Univ. of Jerusalem), for her paper "Research, Subjects: Reception Polling and 'Multiple Socialisms' in Honecker's East Germany"