University Honors

University honors is awarded to less than one percent of the graduating class and is the highest academic award Wesleyan bestows. University Honors are awarded to students who have earned departmental or general scholarship High Honors and have performed with unusual distinction in an oral examination before members of the Committee on Honors.

To be eligible, a student must:

  • fulfill general education expectations,
  • earn high honors (either departmental or in general scholarship),
  • be recommended for University honors, and
  • qualify in an oral examination administered by the Honors Committee

University Honors Recipients, 2001-2022

 


 

YEAR RECIPIENT THESIS TITLE DEPARTMENT/PROGRAM
2023
Nicholas Bowman Maritime connectivity and mobility in the southeastern
Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean during the
Neopalatial Period: A GIS-based approach
Archaeology
Lily Ruth Spar “Evolution, Revolution, and the American
University”: Student Activism at Wesleyan University,
1968-1970
History
2022
Zhaorui Lu Manufacturing Gender Equality in the People's Republic of China, 1949-1984 Government and History
Aiden H. Malanaphy The Brooklyn Tower: A Contentious Conversation of History and Modernity in the Tallest Building in Brooklyn Art History
William Barish Slater "Maligned, Not Unloved": A Biography of Denver's Colfax Avenue History
2021
Zoe Reifel Critical Feminist Methodologies for Creating New Tech General Scholarship
Jonah Skolnik Change & Continuity in the Medieval Trojan Ancestry Tradition Medieval Studies
Jonah Skolnik The Politics of Human Rights-Oriented U.S. Foreign Policy Government
Alex Tripp Culture Industry 2020: The Musical Future of Aesthetic Automony Music
Phoebe Vlahoplus De-Concretizing Marble: A Cultural Biography of the Elgin Marbles History
Xinyue Zhang Beyond Conformity and Dissent College of Social Studies and History
2020

Avi Lipton

Closing the Gap: Stratification Economics and Racial Wealth Inequality in America Economics

Pau Rius Valor

Puns, Power, and Patronage in Early Modern Bavaria Music

Maggie Rothberg

Recasting Assembly: Aristophanes' Ecclesiazusae & the Politics of Play Classical Civilization

 

 

Haoran Zhang

The Forgotten Carnival of Ideas

Government and History

2019

 

 

 

 

 

 

Teresa Naval

Corrugated Cartographies: The Balikbayan Box and its Sociotechnical Networks

Science in Society

 

 

Isabel Steckel

Archives of Nature: Revisiting Aldrovandi's Studio

College of Letters and Italian Studies

2018

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jack Guenther

"Gateway to the World": Hamburg & the Global German Empire, 1881-1914

College of Letters, German Studies and History

 

 

Mira Guth

Cultures of Nature: An Orchard's Tale

Science in Society

 

 

Julia Lejeune

Comparing Two Cognitive Training Approaches in Psychosis

Psychology

 

 

Louisa Winchell

Redevelopment Remains

English

 

 

Rebecca Zegans

On the Origins of Human Questioning

Philosophy

2017

 

 

 

 

Sofia Marie Goode In the Name of Protection: A Queer Abolitionist Critique of Reform Feminist, Gender & Sexuality Studies
Rachel Harlene Rosenman A Rosary Among the Roses: Tracing Pastoral Allusions and Spiritual Resonances in Chamber Music by Mel Bonis French Studies and Music
Rachel Elizabeth Savage Investigating the Thermodynamic Stability of DNA Four-Way Junctions Using Fluorescent Nucleoside Analogues Molecular Biology & Biochemistry
May Tina Treuhaft-Ali Through Everchanging Tracks of Neverchanging Space: Staging James Joyce's Ulysses as a Spatial Practice Theater

 

Varun Ursekar The Pseudopotential as a Tool for Describing Ion Crystal Morphology Physics

2016

Samantha Hellberg Under the Influence: Effects of Ethanol Exposure and Anxiety on Motivation for Gambling-like Cues Psychology

2015

Miles Cornwall "Grocery" an artistic thesis exhibition General Scholarship
Quinta Jurecic Records of Anguish: Democracy, Dirty Hands, and the Myth of the Tragic Politician Government

2014

William Fraker Situating Place Cells in Ecologically Embodied Cognition Science in Society
Benjamin Jacobs When the River of History Disappears: Past in China's Patriotic Education Campaign College of Social Studies
Rebecca McClellan The Catalytic, Asymmetric "Interrupted" Feist-Bénary Reaction of a,Β-Diketoesters Chemistry
Chloe Rinehart Obstacles to Uptake: The Case of Ecuador's Conditional Cash Transfer Program, the Bono de Desarrollo Humano Latin American Studies & Government

2013

Aria Danaparamita British Borobudur Buddha: Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles, Orientalist Antiquarianism, and a Material Historiography of Java (1811-1816) History
Zoe Mueller The Interstate System in the American Cultural Memory: The Creation and Contestation of the Highway Spaces of Cleveland and Detroit, Postwar to Present General Scholarship
Kyra Sutton Islam's Turn on the Couch: The Psychoanalytic Theorizing of Muslim Identity in France College of Letters and French Studies
 2012
Ali Chaudhry To Float, to Peg, or to Hide? Deciphering de facto Exchange Rate Regimes in South Asia Economics
Anna McKinsey "Vascular" - a creative printmaking thesis General Scholarship
Ariel Schwartz Composing the Autistic Self - Current and Emerging Autism Discourses General Scholarship
2011
Solomon Adler "I Belong to Every Country": John James Audubon and the Multivalence of National Identity History
Laura Geronimo Cultural Policy and Economic Development: Empirical and Political Complexities of Relating Arts to Growth in Cities General Scholarship

2010

  Samuel Max Cohen Exploring the Chemical and Biological Nature of Sonic Hedgehog Dependent Cell Proliferation Molecular Biology & Biochemistry
  Brendan Thomas Conuel "The Contradiction at the Heart of the World": Nietzsche, Jesus, and the Detonation of Denotation Religion
  Peter Davenport Hull Economic Shocks and Civil Conflict: Evidence from the Constraints of the Open-Economy Trilemma Mathematics-Economics
 

2009

  Joseph Maximilian Krafft Mighty Fine English
  Alison Epstein Ringel Tdh3 (a GAPDH isozyme) is a novel regulator of Sir2 Molecular Biology & Biochemistry

2008

  Daniel Robert Austin The Role of STEP in Regulating Excitotoxic Cell Death Neuroscience & Behavior
  Cedric Howshan Bien The Barefoot Doctors: China's Rural Health Care Revolution East Asian Studies
  Emma Anne Komlos-Hrobsky "A Self to Recover, A Queen": The Subjects and Poesis in Sylvia Plath's Ariel English
  Kathleen Ellen Mollison ""Men are Made Here": Prosthetic Technologies After WWI History
  Emily Ambrose Wang Nikolai Gumilev, Modernist Mythmaker Russian Languages & Literatures

2007

  Jacob Stuart Goldin Rationality and Self-Conflict Government, Economics

2006

  No recipients    

 

2005

  Robert Laird Judson Secondary Structure in the Replication of Hepatitis Delta Virus RNA Molecular Biology & Biochemistry
  Mark William Vorkink An Imagined Umma: Discourse, Ideology, and the Islamic Natio Religion

2004

  Brittany Joyce Allen Trans/scendence: Ethical Possibility in Intersex Management Science and Society, Women's Studies
  Megan Elizabeth Brown Erasures: 'Chalking' at Wesleyan University, 1992-2003 College of Letters
  Eli Solomon Staub Formalization and Its Discontents College of Social Studies
  Ka Yat Yuen Platform Competition with Must-Have Components College of Social Studies, Economics

2003

  Colin Echeverria Aitken Characterization of the DNA B-A Transition Molecular Biology & Biochemistry
  Elizabeth Anne Hoffecker Rethinking Settlement College of Social Studies

2002

  Benjamin Stewart Allen The New Brazilian Land Reform Latin American Studies
  Colby Brown Reinventing the Wheel: Social Structure and Urban Expressways Sociology
  Olivia Alton Weisser The Compleat Pratice of Physick: Astrology and the Art of Healing in Seventeenth-Century England History

2001

  Joseph Raymond Casey Relocating Culture: Da-sein and the "Hui" People Philosophy, College of Letters
  Brandon Bailey Dotson The Council of Tibet: A Political Analysis of Early Tibetan Buddhism Religion
  Adam Robert Goss Magmatic Evolution of Volcan Copahue, Neuquen, Argentina Earth & Environmental Sciences