ROBERT MAKUS CRITICAL ESSAY PRIZE (aka “The Makus Prize”)

This is a $100 annual cash prize awarded at the end of spring semester for the best critical essay written by an undergraduate or graduate student at UOG. Students currently enrolled full or part-time in any UOG college or program may submit one essay per year.

The prize essay should be thoughtful and cogently argued, perhaps clever and/or profound. Interdisciplinary thinking is preferred, but not required. The essay should be more or less comprehensible to college-educated specialists and non-specialists, relatively free of jargon, and stay true to the inventive spirit of the essay, not the research article. Footnotes are welcome, if needed, but should be kept to a minimum.*

• • Submission Deadline: April 24, 2015 by 4:00 p.m.
  • Submit essay to Kathleen Duenas (671) 735-2725 in DEAL office for receipt acknowledgment (time stamp). The DEAL office is located on the 2^nd floor of the English & Communications Building.
  • Format is Chicago Style, double-spaced, 12 pt. Times New Roman.
  • Length should be 10-15 pages, 8 ½ x 11 paper (hardcopy submission only).
  • Author’s Name should be printed on top, left-hand corner of first page.
  • No co-authored essays accepted.
  • If the judges determine that there is no prize winner, the contest will resume the following year. Submitted essays will not be returned, and rejected submissions will not be acknowledged. The only person to hear from the judges is the prize winner.
  • All essays will be rigorously vetted for plagiarism.

For more insights into the nature of the essay as a distinct genre of writing, see Theodor Adorno, "The Essay as Form," New German Critique, 32:151-171 (1984). This same essay, which sets the gold standard for essay writing, is published in Theodor Adorno, Notes to Literature, Vol. One, trans. Shierry W. Nicholsen (New York: Columbia UP, 1991), 3-23. Other informative works on the essay include G. Douglas Atkins, Tracing the Essay: Through Experience to Truth (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2005), and Robert Con Davis’s “Back to the Essay,” available online as a PDF http://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/sites/default/files/static/docs/davis-undiano-back-to-the-essay.pdf

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Robert “Bob” Makus (died July 14, 2002) was a fellow doctoral student with C. S. Schreiner in the Hermeneutics cohort under Dr. Joseph Kockelmans at Pennsylvania State University.  Bob died of cancer soon after beginning his teaching career in philosophy at University of San Francisco. He was a philosophical writer of exceptional promise and carried himself with dignity unto the moment of his untimely demise. Dr. Schreiner has established the prize in memory of his friend and colleague.