The Office of the Registrar will be closed between Monday, December 23 through Wednesday, January 1 for the winter break.
University Honors
University honors is awarded to less than one percent of the graduating class and is the highest academic award Wesleyan bestows. University Honors are awarded to students who have earned departmental or general scholarship High Honors and have performed with unusual distinction in an oral examination before members of the Committee on Honors.
To be eligible, a student must:
- fulfill general education expectations,
- earn high honors (either departmental or in general scholarship),
- be recommended for University honors, and
- qualify in an oral examination administered by the Honors Committee
University Honors Recipients, 2001-2024
| YEAR | RECIPIENT | THESIS TITLE | DEPARTMENT/PROGRAM | |
| 2024 | ||||
| Margot Cecilia Deguet Delury | “In Tours, We Abort!” Theorizing Post-1968 Activism in the Tourangelle Association for Liberty of Abortion and Contraception |
College of Social Studies, Government | ||
| Asija Qyteza | An Imagined Colony, A Tangible Subject The Albanian Communist Regime’s Attempt to Control the Albanian-American Diaspora (1944-1991) |
Government | ||
| Eric Dimitrios Sakkas | StACKER: A Python Package For Fingerprinting Base Stacking Systems |
Molecular Biology & Biochemistry | ||
| 2023 | ||||
| Nicholas Bowman | Maritime connectivity and mobility in the southeastern Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean during the Neopalatial Period: A GIS-based approach |
Archaeology | ||
| Lily Ruth Spar | “Evolution, Revolution, and the American University”: Student Activism at Wesleyan University, 1968-1970 |
History | ||
| 2022 | ||||
| Zhaorui Lu | Manufacturing Gender Equality in the People's Republic of China, 1949-1984 | Government and History | ||
| Aiden H. Malanaphy | The Brooklyn Tower: A Contentious Conversation of History and Modernity in the Tallest Building in Brooklyn | Art History | ||
| William Barish Slater | "Maligned, Not Unloved": A Biography of Denver's Colfax Avenue | History | ||
| 2021 | ||||
| Zoe Reifel | Critical Feminist Methodologies for Creating New Tech | General Scholarship | ||
| Jonah Skolnik | Change & Continuity in the Medieval Trojan Ancestry Tradition | Medieval Studies | ||
| Jonah Skolnik | The Politics of Human Rights-Oriented U.S. Foreign Policy | Government | ||
| Alex Tripp | Culture Industry 2020: The Musical Future of Aesthetic Automony | Music | ||
| Phoebe Vlahoplus | De-Concretizing Marble: A Cultural Biography of the Elgin Marbles | History | ||
| Xinyue Zhang | Beyond Conformity and Dissent | College of Social Studies and History | ||
| 2020 | ||||
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Avi Lipton |
Closing the Gap: Stratification Economics and Racial Wealth Inequality in America | Economics | ||
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Pau Rius Valor |
Puns, Power, and Patronage in Early Modern Bavaria | Music | ||
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Maggie Rothberg |
Recasting Assembly: Aristophanes' Ecclesiazusae & the Politics of Play | Classical Civilization | ||
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Haoran Zhang |
The Forgotten Carnival of Ideas |
Government and History |
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2019 |
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Teresa Naval |
Corrugated Cartographies: The Balikbayan Box and its Sociotechnical Networks |
Science in Society |
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Isabel Steckel |
Archives of Nature: Revisiting Aldrovandi's Studio |
College of Letters and Italian Studies |
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2018 |
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Jack Guenther |
"Gateway to the World": Hamburg & the Global German Empire, 1881-1914 |
College of Letters, German Studies and History |
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Mira Guth |
Cultures of Nature: An Orchard's Tale |
Science in Society |
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Julia Lejeune |
Comparing Two Cognitive Training Approaches in Psychosis |
Psychology |
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Louisa Winchell |
Redevelopment Remains |
English |
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Rebecca Zegans |
On the Origins of Human Questioning |
Philosophy |
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2017 |
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| Sofia Marie Goode | In the Name of Protection: A Queer Abolitionist Critique of Reform | Feminist, Gender & Sexuality Studies | ||
| Rachel Harlene Rosenman | A Rosary Among the Roses: Tracing Pastoral Allusions and Spiritual Resonances in Chamber Music by Mel Bonis | French Studies and Music | ||
| Rachel Elizabeth Savage | Investigating the Thermodynamic Stability of DNA Four-Way Junctions Using Fluorescent Nucleoside Analogues | Molecular Biology & Biochemistry | ||
| May Tina Treuhaft-Ali | Through Everchanging Tracks of Neverchanging Space: Staging James Joyce's Ulysses as a Spatial Practice | Theater | ||
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Varun Ursekar | The Pseudopotential as a Tool for Describing Ion Crystal Morphology | Physics | |
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2016 |
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| Samantha Hellberg | Under the Influence: Effects of Ethanol Exposure and Anxiety on Motivation for Gambling-like Cues | Psychology | ||
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2015 |
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| Miles Cornwall | "Grocery" an artistic thesis exhibition | General Scholarship | ||
| Quinta Jurecic | Records of Anguish: Democracy, Dirty Hands, and the Myth of the Tragic Politician | Government | ||
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2014 |
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| William Fraker | Situating Place Cells in Ecologically Embodied Cognition | Science in Society | ||
| Benjamin Jacobs | When the River of History Disappears: Past in China's Patriotic Education Campaign | College of Social Studies | ||
| Rebecca McClellan | The Catalytic, Asymmetric "Interrupted" Feist-Bénary Reaction of a,Β-Diketoesters | Chemistry | ||
| Chloe Rinehart | Obstacles to Uptake: The Case of Ecuador's Conditional Cash Transfer Program, the Bono de Desarrollo Humano | Latin American Studies & Government | ||
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2013 |
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| Aria Danaparamita | British Borobudur Buddha: Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles, Orientalist Antiquarianism, and a Material Historiography of Java (1811-1816) | History | ||
| Zoe Mueller | The Interstate System in the American Cultural Memory: The Creation and Contestation of the Highway Spaces of Cleveland and Detroit, Postwar to Present | General Scholarship | ||
| Kyra Sutton | Islam's Turn on the Couch: The Psychoanalytic Theorizing of Muslim Identity in France | College of Letters and French Studies | ||
| 2012 | ||||
| Ali Chaudhry | To Float, to Peg, or to Hide? Deciphering de facto Exchange Rate Regimes in South Asia | Economics | ||
| Anna McKinsey | "Vascular" - a creative printmaking thesis | General Scholarship | ||
| Ariel Schwartz | Composing the Autistic Self - Current and Emerging Autism Discourses | General Scholarship | ||
| 2011 | ||||
| Solomon Adler | "I Belong to Every Country": John James Audubon and the Multivalence of National Identity | History | ||
| Laura Geronimo | Cultural Policy and Economic Development: Empirical and Political Complexities of Relating Arts to Growth in Cities | General Scholarship | ||
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2010 |
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| Samuel Max Cohen | Exploring the Chemical and Biological Nature of Sonic Hedgehog Dependent Cell Proliferation | Molecular Biology & Biochemistry | ||
| Brendan Thomas Conuel | "The Contradiction at the Heart of the World": Nietzsche, Jesus, and the Detonation of Denotation | Religion | ||
| Peter Davenport Hull | Economic Shocks and Civil Conflict: Evidence from the Constraints of the Open-Economy Trilemma | Mathematics-Economics | ||
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2009 |
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| Joseph Maximilian Krafft | Mighty Fine | English | ||
| Alison Epstein Ringel | Tdh3 (a GAPDH isozyme) is a novel regulator of Sir2 | Molecular Biology & Biochemistry | ||
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2008 |
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| Daniel Robert Austin | The Role of STEP in Regulating Excitotoxic Cell Death | Neuroscience & Behavior | ||
| Cedric Howshan Bien | The Barefoot Doctors: China's Rural Health Care Revolution | East Asian Studies | ||
| Emma Anne Komlos-Hrobsky | "A Self to Recover, A Queen": The Subjects and Poesis in Sylvia Plath's Ariel | English | ||
| Kathleen Ellen Mollison | ""Men are Made Here": Prosthetic Technologies After WWI | History | ||
| Emily Ambrose Wang | Nikolai Gumilev, Modernist Mythmaker | Russian Languages & Literatures | ||
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2007 |
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| Jacob Stuart Goldin | Rationality and Self-Conflict | Government, Economics | ||
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2006 |
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| No recipients | ||||
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2005 |
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| Robert Laird Judson | Secondary Structure in the Replication of Hepatitis Delta Virus RNA | Molecular Biology & Biochemistry | ||
| Mark William Vorkink | An Imagined Umma: Discourse, Ideology, and the Islamic Natio | Religion | ||
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2004 |
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| Brittany Joyce Allen | Trans/scendence: Ethical Possibility in Intersex Management | Science and Society, Women's Studies | ||
| Megan Elizabeth Brown | Erasures: 'Chalking' at Wesleyan University, 1992-2003 | College of Letters | ||
| Eli Solomon Staub | Formalization and Its Discontents | College of Social Studies | ||
| Ka Yat Yuen | Platform Competition with Must-Have Components | College of Social Studies, Economics | ||
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2003 |
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| Colin Echeverria Aitken | Characterization of the DNA B-A Transition | Molecular Biology & Biochemistry | ||
| Elizabeth Anne Hoffecker | Rethinking Settlement | College of Social Studies | ||
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2002 |
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| Benjamin Stewart Allen | The New Brazilian Land Reform | Latin American Studies | ||
| Colby Brown | Reinventing the Wheel: Social Structure and Urban Expressways | Sociology | ||
| Olivia Alton Weisser | The Compleat Pratice of Physick: Astrology and the Art of Healing in Seventeenth-Century England | History | ||
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2001 |
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| Joseph Raymond Casey | Relocating Culture: Da-sein and the "Hui" People | Philosophy, College of Letters | ||
| Brandon Bailey Dotson | The Council of Tibet: A Political Analysis of Early Tibetan Buddhism | Religion | ||
| Adam Robert Goss | Magmatic Evolution of Volcan Copahue, Neuquen, Argentina | Earth & Environmental Sciences | ||