The Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures is pleased to announce the inauguration of a new essay prize. The David Holloway Memorial Essay Prize will be awarded to the best essay to explore issues of gender in Japanese literature/culture. Two prizes will be given per year in the categories of Best Undergraduate Essay and Best Graduate Essay.
To be eligible for this award, essays need to focus on Japanese literature/culture and explore questions of gender.
There is no word limit, but please be sure your papers are double spaced throughout and use Times Roman 12-point font
Students should feel free to submit papers written for classes or written for this award. Faculty are invited to nominate a student paper.
The deadline for the 2022 David Holloway Memorial Essay Prize is May 10, 2022.
Please email essays to Ms. Krystél Mowery at ealc@wustl.edu. Be sure to note “David Holloway Memorial Essay Prize” in the subject of your email and indicate whether you are applying for the undergraduate or graduate category.
About David Holloway:
Dr. David Sands Holloway was an alumnus of Washington University in St. Louis (BA ’03 and PhD ’14, Japanese Language and Literature) and the University of Colorado Boulder (MA ‘07). At the time of his death, he was a tenure-track assistant professor of Japanese in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultures at the University of Rochester.
A native of Colorado and a first-generation college student, David began his studies of Japanese literature at Washington University in Fall 1999. He graduated summa cum laude in Spring 2003. After earning an MA in Japanese Language and Literature from the University of Colorado Boulder in 2007, he returned to Washington University for his PhD studies. His dissertation, “Look at Me: Japanese Women Writers at the Millennial Turn,” dealt with contemporary women writers Kanehara Hitomi, Ami Sakurai, and Hasegawa Junko, and the way they placed their characters in the visual economy of sexual politics.
David took a position as an assistant professor of Japanese in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultures at the University of Rochester in 2017 where he was also an important member of the Susan B. Anthony Institute for Gender Sexuality and Women’s Studies. Recently, he had taken on the role of director of East Asian Studies. He taught the core course “Sex and Power” for the SBA Institute. He developed and taught eight new courses for the MLC Department focused on modern Japanese literature and the intersection with gender, media, fantasy, and millennial issues. Ever concerned with equity and social justice, he taught at the Five Points Correctional Facility though what is now the Rochester Education Justice Initiative. Whatever the course or wherever the classroom, his students adored him.
David was a brilliant, prolific scholar and a careful wordsmith. He already had six peer-review publications to his name with additional works under consideration. He had recently finished the manuscript The End of Transgression: Gender, Body, Nation, under contract with Routledge Press. The End of Transgression reads the works of Natsuo Kirino, Sakurai Ami, and Kanehara Hitomi against the backdrop of Japan’s lost decade and the culture of precarity it engendered. In addition to academic writing, David was a prize-winner photographer, a fashion connoisseur (he preferred Alexander McQueen) and a creative writer specializing in the very short form of flash fiction. His longer story “An Encounter at Aokigahara” was recently published in the collection Yamamba: In Search of the Japanese Mountain Witch (Stone Bridge Press, 2021).
