Every year, the Winkler Prize is awarded to the best graduate or undergraduate paper from a North American program in “a risky or marginal area of Classics”. Kelly’s essay, titled “Queering Telemachus: Ocean Vuong, Postmemories and the Vietnam War,” won out over a very competitive field, impressing the judges with her “originality, eloquence, and persuasive and brilliant reading”.

Kelly graduated with honors and highest distinction from Stanford University in 2012 with a B.A. in Classics and Archaeology and is the first woman to graduate from the Ancient History program in the Department of Classics at Brown University. Her interdisciplinary research engages classical studies in a comparative manner to explore imperialism, forced displacement and race and ethnicity. Her dissertation, “Vercingetorix in Vietnam: Classical Inheritance and Vietnamese Ambivalence,” is the first major study to examine the history of Greco-Roman classical reception within Vietnamese contexts. 

In the summer of 2021, Kelly will join the Department of Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley as a University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellow. In the fall of 2021, she will join the Department of Classics at Stanford University as an inaugural Provostial Fellow for Studies in Race and Ethnicity.

You can find more information about the prize on the Oberlin College website. Congratulations again to Kelly.