Six Trinity College students were announced as Global or Regional Winners in this year’s Undergraduate Awards (UA). All six of them received their awards at this year’s UA Global Summit, which was held in Dublin from November 8-11. The summit is held in Dublin for four days each November.
The UA programme is divided into Global and Regional sections. Global Winners are chosen from a worldwide pool of students. The programme also is divided into 7 Regions which grant their own awards to students within each particular Region.
Three of Ireland’s Global Winners came from Trinity. The three Global Winners were Naoise Dolan in English Literature, Stephen Cox for Non-English Literature and Eoin O’Leary in Social Sciences: Anthropology & Cultural Studies.
Dolan came first out of 49 candidates from around the world for her paper “‘Too Many for the Jury’: Pip’s Multitudinous Narration”. 13 Trinity students were nominated for the English category.
Five of the seven students nominated for the Non-English category came from Trinity. Cox came first for his paper “Jorge Luis Borges and Translation: A Comparative Study of Translated Borges Stories in English”.
The Social Sciences category has been divided into two subcategories since last year. O’Leary came first out of 38 candidates in the Anthropology & Cultural Studies subcategory for his paper “Political Action from Spaces of Bare Life: Situating the Figure of the Refugee/Asylum Seeker in Power Analysis”. There were 53 candidates across the entire Social Studies category.
Of the winners for the Island of Ireland Region, three out of 16 were Trinity students. Benjamin Price won for Art History, Music, Film & Theatre, Conor McGlynn won for Philosophy and Rory Hennessy won for Law.
Trinity was well-represented in Law, with a fifth of Highly Commended participants (6 out of 29 international students) coming from College.
Trinity representation in the UA awards was down from last year, which had 9 winners. Trinity had also won in the Social Studies category last year, albeit before it was divided into subcategories. Ruth Murphy was announced as Overall Winner in Social Studies for her paper “Relations of an Anti-Genesis: the Muselmann, Primo Levi and Viktor Frankl”, coming first out of 30 international candidates.
The Undergraduate Awards programme is the largest academic programme in the world and covers every discipline. All penultimate or final year undergraduate students are eligible to submit research work. The programme has been patronised by President Michael D Higgins since February 2012.
