MA student Elizabeth Riddick wins first prize in the JASNA essay contest

Posted on 20 October 2025

Congratulations Elizabeth!

CECS is thrilled to announce that Elizabeth Riddick, CECS MA student (2024-25), has won first prize in the Graduate School Division for the 2025 Jane Austen Society of North America Essay Contest.

Elizabeth's essay, 'An Open and Shut Case(ment): The Form and Function of Windows in Jane Austen's Novels', has now been published as Open Access by JASNA.

In it, she takes an interdisciplinary approach to windows in Austen's fiction, persuasively showing how they operate as 'commodity and structural device'. Elizabeth traces a range of perspectives and views, and concludes that the window's 'static surface functions not only as a means of aesthetic display, but it also becomes a dynamic boundary around which Austen's characters interact'.