Art History major Adi Dina wins the 2020 Iwanter Prize, awarded by the Center for the Humanities to an outstanding interdisciplinary senior thesis in the humanities! Adi conducted her project, “Plastic Surveillance: Negotiating Digital Girlhood in the Work of Portia Munson, Julia Scher, and Juliana Huxtable,” under the direction of Professor Jill Casid. The selection committee notes with admiration how Adi’s “deeply researched and critically sharp scholarship brought together gender studies, contemporary art, and digital studies into truly original constellations.” They commend Adi’s thesis for demonstrating “truly original research, deft movement between theoretical and practical concerns, and accomplished academic prose.” And they find Adi’s arguments surveillance, identity and consumer culture to be “solidly evidenced and elegantly articulated.” The annual Iwanter Prize provides an unrestricted $2,000 award to one graduating senior who, through a senior thesis and general academic distinction, demonstrates outstanding humanities-based scholarship of a broad and interdisciplinary nature. The award is made possible by a gift to the University of Wisconsin Foundation by Sidney E. Iwanter, an alumnus of the College of Letters & Science (BA History, 1971).
