The University Writing Program is honored to announce:

The Julian Clement Chase Prize

for undergraduate writing focused on the District of Columbia
$1,000
Submission date:
Award ceremony: October 2019

Submission Criteria

Submissions will be accepted for undergraduate work completed this academic year, including but not limited to UW1020 and Writing in the Disciplines Courses, senior theses or capstone projects, and other work undertaken at the university.

Complete applications will be evaluated based on the following criteria:

• Original research demonstrating in-depth engagement with the Washington, DC community from any discipline taught at the George Washington University, including social sciences, humanities, arts, and sciences.  

• Clear and effective communication of ideas, including consideration of whether project makes a contribution to the scholarship in a particular field (e.g. ethnomusicology, sociology of neighborhoods, or scientific analysis of water services that leads to policy recommendations).

• Adherence to academic standards of a particular field or discipline.

Entries will be reviewed by a committee composed of GWU faculty, representatives from the DC Community, and former winners of the Prize.

To learn more and apply for this award, please download this form and follow the instructions.  Please contact Phyllis Ryder ([email protected]) or Randi Kristensen ([email protected]) with any questions.

Past Winners

In 2018, the Prize was shared by two winners:

Lydia Francis, The Irony of Capital Development: A Critical History of the Origins of Meridian Hill Park from the Perspective of Washington Residents

Lydia's paper is a layered historical analysis of the development of Meridian Hill Park.  She reframes the common narrative about urban park development by providing evidence that the community that was demolished was likely a thriving, established, and diverse working class area.  

Xavier Adomatis, “Re-Segregate DC Schools: An analysis of gentrification’s peculiar consequences on Francis-Stevens.”

Xavier's offers a provocative analysis of one of Georgetown's public elementary school: School Without Walls, Francis-Stevens.  When the school recruited more neighborhood students, parents sent their children to preschool and then transferred them to private schools after kindergarten.  As a result, the school lost its Title IX funding without benefiting from parents' on-going participation with the school.

In 2017, the winner was  Human Services and Social Justice graduate Victoria Rowe, “Seek First to Understand: Exploring the Implementation of Culturally Relevant Education in the District of Columbia.”

After demonstrating the educational disparity among DC's black and white students, and reporting the dissatisfaction that black students have expressed about local school climate, Rowe reviews education scholarship and finds that culturally relevant education could have a positive effect.  She then interviews a pool of DCPS teachers to discover whether they use culturally relevant teaching strategies and whether the DCPS professional development programs have helped them do so.  She concludes with policy recommendations.

In 2016, the prize was shared by two winners:

Kaeleigh Christie (Sociology ‘16) critiques DC's public-school truancy policy in practice. Using DCPS datasets, Christie highlights remarkable inconsistencies in the ways DC public schools practice early intervention for truancy, suggesting that more resources might allow schools to offer more potentially beneficial support to at-risk students.

Emily Niekrasz (History ‘16) advances an argument that is as timely as it is historically grounded: that the national civil rights movement is tied up with the status of the nation's capital--and vice versa. She combined research in archives and special collections with with DC-related sources tracked down as far afield as South Carolina to demonstrate how the most rigorous historical methodology can examine Washington's recent past to address issues of the broadest importance.