Jordan Chuancy, a PhD candidate in Medieval Studies, has been awarded the 2026 Tom Hill Prize for "Reason and the Egg: A Trans Feminine Roman de Silence." Jordan's essay offers a new approach to the thirteenth-century French romance Le Roman de Silence, (re)reading the complex gender play of the titular Silence -- who is born a daughter to a noble couple, assigned to live as a son to ensure proper patrimony, but exposed in the work's conclusion as a woman and married to a king -- as a reparative trans-feminine narrative that reveals the complexity of trans experience and its literary (re)presentations.
The Tom Hill Prize, established in 2024 in honor of Professor Emeritus Tom Hill, who taught in the Medieval Studies Program and the Department of Literatures in English from 1967 until 2022, is awarded to a Cornell graduate student in any field who is judged to have written the best essay in any area of Medieval Studies.
