Mentzer named Backus award winner

Elianna Mentzer ’19 has received this year’s Candace Carlucci Backus '66 FYE Prize honoring student academic achievement in the First-Year Experience.

The prize, supported through the generosity of Candace Carlucci Backus ’66, is awarded annually to up to three first-year students in recognition of exceptional scholarly or artistic achievement in the fall’s Scribner Seminars.

Mentzer’s project, a paper titled “The Monstrous ‘Other’ in the Middle Ages,” was written for the “World Turned Upside Down” Scribner Seminar, taught by Kate Greenspan, Department of English, who nominated Mentzer for consideration.

Said Greenspan, “Elianna's work was stellar throughout the course, but her final paper was a revelation.”

Greenspan explained that students first wrote an "imaginary paper" in which they formulated questions about a topic that interested them, formed a tentative thesis, thought about what sources to use to address it, imagined how to handle contradictory information, and came up with tentative conclusions. Later in the course they narrowed down their thesis and put together an annotated bibliography of relevant sources, which they shared with the class. During the last two weeks of class, they talked about their topics and spent class time writing the paper and critiquing each other's drafts. They read a shortened version of their final papers to the class "Fools' Dinner."

“For the final paper,” Greenspan said, “students were expected to refer not only to texts we studied but to others they found and evaluated on their own.” The result was to be a five- to seven–page paper that presented a clear argument based on primary and secondary sources related to one or more of the course's themes.

Mentzer’s subject was the dark turn the carnival tradition took from seasonal religious practice to satire, rebellion, and persecution. Said Greenspan, “She makes a superbly argued connection between the representation of imagined beings inhabiting unknown parts of the earth to the rejection and persecution of those who physically and culturally fell outside the European Christian norm: the handicapped, the deformed, and the Jews, among others. Basing her discussion on some of the most important scholarly work in the field, she intelligently traces the transfer of the symbolism of the monstrous races to out groups.

“I have rarely gotten so beautifully written, so well researched, and so soundly argued a paper from a first-year student; indeed, many juniors and seniors might do worse than to think and write like Elianna,” Greenspan added.

Mentzer was one of 14 students nominated for the Backus Award. The selection committee consisted of Ron Seyb, Department of Government; Jina Mao, Department of Management and Business; and Linda Hall, Department of English.