Helene W. Koon Memorial Award

​​WSECS established this award as a tribute to the innovative scholarship, creative teaching, and generous spirit of Helene W. Koon, a scholar of eighteenth-century dramatic literature and professor of English at California State University, San Bernardino.

The WSECS Committee offers an award of $400 for the best paper presented at the annual conference by a graduate student, post doc, independent scholar, contingent or junior faculty member.  All nontenured delegates are encouraged to submit their papers via e-mail to the conference organizers no later than the Friday following the meeting.  Papers may not be longer than 2500 words plus notes.  The WSECS Committee will notify the winner, acknowledge the award on the society website, and present it at the following year’s conference.     

The 2023 WSECS Committee was pleased to confer multiple awards: 
First Prize: Xinyuan Qiu (Binghamton University), “Women’s Headdresses as Material Means of Knowing and Altering Their Worlds in Eighteenth-Century Britain”
Second Prize: Miranda Hoegberg (University of California, Los Angeles), "Hogarth’s Open Doors and the Problem of Perspective in Novelistic Scene-Setting”
Third Prize: Tekla Babyak (Disabled Independent Scholar), “The Aesthetics of Distracted Listening in the 18th and 21st Centuries”

The 2020 WSECS Committee was pleased to confer multiple awards: 
First Prize: Lesley Thulin (University of California, Los Angeles), “Belinda's Hypochondria Narrative”​
Second Prize: Ashley Greathouse (University of Cincinnati), “Aristocratic Pleasure for the 'Middle Sort': Franz Joseph Haydn’s 'Hunt' Symphony at London’s Vauxhall Gardens"​
Third Prize: Calinda Shely (Northern Arizona University), "Anthropo(s)cenic Seasides: Postwar Development in Sanditon"