Announcing the winner of ACCUTE’s inaugural graduate student conference paper prize

The winner of ACCUTE’s first contest for the best graduate student paper delivered at our annual conference is L. Camille van der Marel (University of Alberta) for her paper “Diasporic citizens, treaty citizenship: decolonizing the individual in transnational literary critique.” Van der Marel’s paper considers the roles of individual, community, citizenship, and land in the scholarship on Indigenous literature and that on diasporic literature, and in the process she notes some of the colonialist reinscriptions of the latter’s non-territory based understandings of community. Her paper is an accessible, timely, and carefully conscientious call to rethink how the scholarship on Indigenous literature and that on diasporic literature differ, and to find common ground between them for solidarity and action.

For this inaugural year, the F. E. L. Priestley Prize committee, constituted by Ann Gagné (George Brown College), Nat Hurley (University of Alberta), and Chair Mark A. McCutcheon (Athabasca University), judged this contest (without committing future Priestley committees to do so). Judging was blind, like peer review: they received the submitted papers with no identifying details. A total of thirteen papers were submitted by the deadline of May the 4th. The force is indeed strong with those students who had their conference papers prepared so far in advance of the conference!