The Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English (ACCUTE) awarded its first Graduate Student Conference Paper Prize to EFS PhD candidate Camille van der Marel for her paper "Diasporic citizens, treaty citizenship: decolonizing the individual in transnational literary critique." This new prize was introduced at the 2018 ACCUTE conference, held May 26-29 at the Congress of Social Sciences and Humanities at the University of Regina. Essays that had been submitted by graduate student participants ahead of the conference were judged on the basis of the originality and overall excellence of scholarship, the quality of writing (style, clarity, persuasiveness of argument), professionalism, and suitability for conference presentation.
Announcing the prize at the ACCUTE Annual Celebration of Research at Congress, the adjudication committee observed that "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." In addition to the $300 prize (and a fabulous ACCUTE t-shirt), Camille's name and the title of her paper will be featured on the ACCUTE website and in the ACCUTE newsletter.