WCS News
Leah Leneman Essay Prize
Women, Culture and Society student wins essay prize.
Nel Whiting, a WCS student who graduated in 2010 has won the Leah Leneman Essay Prize, awarded biennially by Women's History Scotland. Nel (pictured to the right) won the prize for an essay based on her WCS MLitt dissertation entitled Gender, class and nationality in David Allan's 'small, Domestic and conversation' works.
The view of the essay prize judges:
"This is an accomplished piece of art history, clearly and elegantly written and presented, that has something both fresh and refreshing to say about gender as expressed within this particular creative medium and manages to make art history relevant to the general landscape of Scottish women’s history. The author carefully presents her evidence, explaining her approaches to the uninitiated reader in a scholarly and clear manner. She certainly succeeds in her intention to consider Allan’s conversation pieces ‘both as aesthetic objects and in terms of their social content’. She makes a persuasive case for how these conversation pieces are gendered and links them with insight and polish to the discourses of the time. In addition to the careful analysis of six of David Allan’s conversation pieces (and a related work by Zoffany), it draws on archival material in three repositories. There is an impressive range of secondary works, showing wide reading in social, as well as art, history. We agree that this impressive essay should be the winner of the Leah Leneman Prize for 2010 because of its professionalism and a satisfying sense of a competent and clear understanding of the wide range of issues she draws on, and for its effective engagement with primary and secondary material, originality of content, clarity of discussion and insightful argument."
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