The Vilém Mathesius Awards for the best MA and BA theses are awarded every year by the Vilém Mathesius Foundation for the Promotion of English and American Studies in Prague (Nadační fond Viléma Mathesia pro rozvoj anglo-amerických studií v Praze).

The Foundation was established in 1992 when the Department of English and American Studies received a gift from its then students. This foundation (IČO 45251789, address: nám. Jana Palacha 2, Prague 1) was named after the founder of English studies in Czechoslovakia and the first professor of this subject at Charles University, Vilém Mathesius (1882-1945). The purpose of the foundation is to finance activities contributing to the development of English and American studies which cannot financially supported by the university.

Such activities include the annual Vilém Mathesius awards for the best BA and MA theses. The awards for MA theses consist in a diploma and a cash prize. The authors of the best BA theses are presented with a diploma and with a material reward (book) according to the financial possibilities of the foundation.

The Vilém Mathesius Foundation is delighted to announce that on 22 December 2015, it became the recipient of a generous donation by Professor Martin Hilský, intended primarily for the acknowledgment of the best doctoral dissertations completed at the Department of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures and the Department of the English Language and ELT Methodology.

The donor perceives his donation as a form of paying back the debt owed to the students of English and American Studies, whose magnanimous donation of funds to the Department of English and American studies after November 1989 facilitated the establishment of The Vilém Mathesius Foundation itself. In the words of Professor Hilský, the donation represents “a very modest attempt at a contribution to the continuity of good will and to the invisible network of good which, he is convinced, exists.”

List of the award-winning theses in Anglophone literatures

2024

MA theses

1st

• Daria Shakurova, ‘Events of Sand’: Affirmative Speculations in Contemporary American Drama

2nd

• Sára Benešová, ‘Old Tales in New Skins’: Three Authors Reinvent the Fairy Tales

BA theses

• Emma Kurucová, Transformation of Woman through a Feminist Lens in The World’s Wife by Carol Ann Duffy

2023

MA theses

1st (shared)

• Michaela Černá, ‘Legs apart as the tide came in’: Fluid Sexual Personae of Ann Quin
• Jaroslav Vítek, Christian Ethics and the Victorian Novel: The Child as a Christ Figure in Oliver Twist, Silas Marner, and The Master-Christian

2nd: not awarded

BA theses

not awarded

2022

MA theses

1st

• Zuzana Holečková: Moving the Frontier of Conscience: Representations of Animal Ethics in Selected Works of Contemporary Anglophone Literature
• Aleksandar Momčilović: Literary Politics of the Radio Free Europe in Czechoslovakia in the Period of “Normalization”

2nd

• Dunja Ilić: Between Mainstream and Avant-Garde Filmmaking: The French New Wave and the Illusion of Realism
• Hana Farniková: Haunted by the New Woman

BA theses

• Eliška Zunová: Fiction and Truth in Jeanette Winterson’s Novels
• Jan Kostohryz: Against His Own Theory: The Contradictions of B. S. Johnson’s Fiction
• Kristina Pěkníková: Alternatives to the Married State in the Works of Margaret Oliphant

2021

PhD dissertations – Martin Hilský Award

• Veronika Krajíčková: The Problem of the Fixity of Tables: Virginia Woolf as a Non-dualist and Process-Oriented Thinker
• Františka Schormová: African American Poets Abroad: Black and Red Allegiances in Early Cold War Czechoslovakia

MA theses

1st

• Peter Ľuba: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Friedrich Nietzsche, John Dewey, and the Creative Reader
• Valeryia Sabitova: Brophy, Deligny, and Guattari: The Avant-garde as Subsumption and Stratification
• Jan Zikmund: Edward Thomas as a Critic

2nd

• Nathalie Lamprecht: Class, Sexuality and Nationalism: Identity Building in the Prose Writings of Brendan Behan
• Tomáš Suchánek: Parasitic Voices and Prosthetic Selves: Detecting the Post-Lyrical Subject in the Works of Contemporary Digital Literature

BA theses

• Alena Brabencová: A Thesis Against Individualism: Interaction with the Other in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America
• Jaroslav Vítek: Writing Victorian London: The Representation of Nineteenth-Century Anxieties in The String of Pearls and Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

2020

PhD dissertations – Martin Hilský Award

• Petra Johana Poncarová: The Political Poetry of Derick Thomson

MA theses

1st

Teja Šosterič: Labyrinths in Postmodernism: Danielewski, Pynchon, Wallace

BA theses

Daria Shakurova: Surviving the Good Life: Cruel Optimism of the American Dream in Modern American Drama

James Ragan Prize: Nadezda Tjuska

2019

PhD dissertations – Martin Hilský Award: not awarded

MA theses

1st (shared)

• Zdeněk Polívka: Between Nostalgia and Pragmatism: Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy
• Alex Russell: David Foster Wallace, Technology and the Self

2nd: not awarded

BA theses

• Hana Radová: A Critical Analysis of the Male Protagonists in the Brontë Sisters’ Novels
• Anna Cranfordová: Postmodernities in Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49

James Ragan Prize: Štěpán Krejčí

2018

PhD dissertations – Martin Hilský Award

• Einat Adar: Absurd Consequences: Beckett and Berkeley

MA theses

• Magdalena Císlerová: Blurring the Lines between Reality and Fiction: Peter Carey’s Engagement with Australian History and Identity

BA theses

• Dominika Kecsöová: “Persephone the Wanderer”: Myth in the Poetry of Contemporary American Women Poets

James Ragan Prize: Kristýna Greňová

2017

PhD dissertations – Martin Hilský Award

• Tereza Jiroutová Kynčlová: Chicana Literature: A Feminist Perspective of Gloria Anzaldúa’s Identity Politics
• Stephan Delbos: Behind Enemy Lines: The New American Poetry and the Cold War Anthology Wars

MA theses

• Martina Hrbková: Gender Consciousness and Representation in Virginia Woolf’s Writing in Light of Contemporary Feminism and Gender Theory
• Tereza Novická: The American Dream Machine: Anti-Systemic Fictions of Coover, Thompson, Burroughs, and Acker
• Martin Sedláček: Changing Tendencies in Self-Conscious Narratives: A Contrastive Interpretation

BA theses

• Tomáš Suchánek: Resonance and Self-resonance: Gilles Deleuze’s Involuntary Memory in Marcel Proust and Samuel Beckett

James Ragan Prize: Anna Ohlídalová

Photos from the awards ceremony

2016

MA theses

• Františka Zezuláková Schormová: Us and Them: Presenting America 1948-1956
• Kristýna Hoblová: The Reflection of the Exclusion Crisis (1678-83) in Contemporary Literature
• Martin Světlík: The Weekend of Dermot & Grace: Eugene R. Watters’ Long Modernist Poem

BA theses

• Nikol Němcová: Women in the English Drama of the Orient
• Hana Němečková: Aided Derbforgaill: Recurrent Motifs in the Ulster Cycle and their Relation to the Status of Women
• Jan Zikmund: Thinking Globally: Seamus Heaney and Dennis O’Driscoll

James Ragan Prize: Aren Ock

2015

MA theses

• Michaela Plicková: The Quest for Identity within the Reality of Plantation Memory in Eudora Welty’s Short Fiction

BA theses

• Magdalena Císlerová: Free of Inhibitions and Full of Pleasure: The Image of Europe in the Works of James Salte
• Vladimír Novák: Grotesque, or Queer? Homosexual Characters in Tennessee Williams’s Selected Short Stories
• Martin Sedláček: Interpreting Narrative Techniques in Moby-Dick
  
• Šárka Tůmová: Reinhold Niebuhr, Christian Realism and the Poetry of W.H. Auden

James Ragan Prize: Anastasija Siljanoska

2014

MA theses

• 1st prize – Petra Johana Poncarová: From the Woods of Raasay to Glasgow Streets: Poetry of Place in the Works of Sorley MacLean and Derick
  Thomson
• 2nd prize – Galina Kiryushina: Saying Seen Again: Audio-Visual Aspects of Samuel Beckett’s Company, Ill Seen Ill Said and Worstward Ho

BA theses

• Zdeněk Polívka: Religion of War: The Disruption of Telos in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian

2013

MA theses

• 1st prize – Filip Krtička: Telling Community in William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily”: A Case Study in Narrative Technique
• 2nd prize – Martin Lauer: Instability of Character in Sam Shepard’s Work of the 1970s

BA theses

• Elizabet Kovačeva: Narrative Structures in Virginia Woolf’s Shorter Fiction
• Andrea Bielková: Shakespearean Minorities: Myth, Prejudice and Transformation

2012

MA theses

• Teata Binarová: Heritage and Innovation: Polynesian Literature in English

BA theses

• Alex Lorenzů: Literary, Cultural and Historical Influences in the Works and Beliefs of Oscar Wilde
• Tereza Pavlíčková: Topographies of Culture and Identity: The Role of Landscapes and Cityscapes in Selected Film Representations of Ireland
• David Koranda: Mamet’s Men: Crisis of Masculinity in Modern Society as Represented in the Work of David Mamet
• Michaela Plicková: Emerging Voices: The Portrayal of Minorities in the Work of Willa Cather

2011

MA theses

• Martin Štefl: The Aesthetics and Short Prose of D. H. Lawrence
• Karolína Vančurová: Affinities between the Poetry of Wallace Stevens and Paul Valéry

BA theses

• Galina Kiryushina: Something Gone Wrong with the Silence: The Motif of Voice in Samuel Beckett’s Embers, Eh Joe and That Time
• David Lukeš: Textual Identity in Selected Novels by Philip Roth: Representation, Dissimulation, Creation
• Jitka Štollová: Anatomy of Villainy: The Concept of an Antagonist in Tragedies and Histories of William Shakespeare

2010

MA theses

• David Nitsche: The Arab Peoples of T. E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom in the Light of Post-Colonial Theory
• Slávka Strouhalová: Sign, Symbol and Allegory in Hawthorne’s Stories and The Scarlet Letter

BA theses

• Jakub Boguszak: Lear on Screen
• Marika Buršíková: The Metaphysical Detective Story in Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy and Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49

2009

• Nina Makelberge: Experiencing Nature: Reading of Emerson’s Mythopoeia

2008

• David Vichnar: Joyce against Theory

2007

• Iva Rezková: Shakespeare Revisited: Rewritings of Shakespeare in Modern British Drama
• Maciej Ruczaj: Postmodern Inferno: Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman between Modern and Medieval Netherworlds
• Zuzana Josková: Transformation of the Myth of White Trash

2006

• Pavel Černovský: Incompatibilities: The Possibility of Engagement in Contemporary Literary Theory
• Klára Petříková: The Topos of the Bower in Middle English Verse Romance
• Hana Dušáková: Japanese American Experience in the Works of Nisei Authors

2005

• Irina Ivanova: Play-within-Play in Selected Jacobean and Caroline Tragedies
• Hana Pavelková: Dramatizing the Medium: Samuel Beckett’s Work for Radio, Theatre, Film and Television
• Ester Žantovská: Samuel Beckett’s and Harold Pinter’s Dramas of Memory
• Blanka Maderová: An Melville vs. Emerson: Identity and Performance in Melville’s Confidence-Man
• Hana Ondráčková: Radiant Literature – Thomas Pynchon: Gravity’s Rainbow

2004

• Halka Varhaníková: Towards India: Representations of India in Contemporary British Fiction
• Miroslava Kopicová: The Frames of Meaning: The Poetry in A.S. Byatt’s Possession
• Dagmar Junková: An Ambiguous Triumph: Evolving Stereotypes of Local Color Fiction in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening
• Anna Nováková: Rhetorical Analysis of the Sermons of Jonathan Edwards

2003

• Tomáš Neřold: Cooper’s “Histories”: The Explanation of Historical Change in The Spy and The Pioneers

2002

• Klára Lukavská: Towards the Interpretation and Genre Characteristics of The Hobbit
• Marek Antonín: Private Experience and National Identity in the Poetry of Walt Whitman, Allen Ginsberg and Robert Pinsky
• Petra Šubrtová: Towards the Poetics of Ceremony: A Study in Native American Fiction
• Jana Mlčochová: Freedom and Subjectivity: The Late Novels of Henry James

2001

• Mariana Housková: Žena a vlk: Dvě staroanglické elegie
• Radka Schlosserová: Symbolism of Names in Toni Morrison’s Novels

2000

• Lucie Formánková: The Mental History of Macbeth
• Lucie Johnová: Parents-Children Relationships in Shakespeare’s Romances
• Pavlína Eliášová: Who They Are and Where They Are Going: Female Characters in Louise Erdrich