2026 Call for Submissions
Undergraduate students are welcome to submit 1,000-1,500-word academic essays on any topic relevant to the study of Emerson—his life, work, national and transnational reception, importance within and beyond U.S. literature and culture, and/or contemporary relevance. Winning essays will demonstrate originality, clarity, and rigorous engagement with Emerson. Selected essays may be returned to applicants with suggested revisions. The winning essay will be published in The Emerson Society Papers and the writer awarded $100. Please submit essays to thomas.howard@bilkent.edu.tr by May 1, 2026.
2026 Winner: Attri Dey
We are delighted to award the 2026 Undergraduate Student Essay Award to Attri Dey (Rabindra Bharati University) for the essay, “The Iron Necessity: Emerson’s ‘Fate’ and the Secularized Calvinist Theodicy.”
Dey’s essay offers a reinterpretation of Emerson’s late masterpiece “Fate,” arguing that its darker, necessitarian vision represents not a break from his Transcendentalism but a dialectical return to the Calvinist inheritance he had spent decades evading. Tracing a line from Emerson’s early sermons and journals through “Self-Reliance” and “Compensation” to The Conduct of Life, the essay shows how the structures of divine sovereignty and submission persist in secular disguise — the theology naturalized, but its grammar of compulsion intact. Dey’s essay will appear in a future issue of Emerson Society Papers.
2nd Place: Elan Cohen, “America is More Polarized Than Ever. Emerson Can Help”
3rd Place: Emily D. Holtrop, “The Artistic Scholar: Combining Aesthetics and Science to Comprehensively Study the Natural World”
Previous Award Recipients
- 2026: Attri Dey
- 2020: Simon Navarrete (Honorable Mention: Patrick J. Wohlscheid)