Annual SWIP-NYC Graduate Student Essay Prize

SWIP-NYC holds an annual essay prize competition for graduate students who are women, or who identify or have ever been identified as women. The annual call for paper goes out at the beginning of the spring semester. The winner is invited to present their paper in NYC in the second half of the spring semester. Papers in all areas of philosophy are welcome.

Due to our general hiatus for the academic year 2025-2026, there will be no SWIP-NYC Graduate Student Essay Prize in 2026. The prize will be back in 2027. Stay tuned for the CFP, which will be posted in early 2027.

Past Winners

2026: No winner. (SWIP-NYC hiatus, due to sabbaticals of both directors.)

2025: Ashley Ding (Columbia University), “Do Large Language Models Understand?,” and Ripley Stroud (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill), “Moral Norms on Peer Disagreement”

2024: Eleanor Jerome (CUNY), “Where Ethics and Aesthetics Diverge: Reconsidering the Objection from Creepiness,” and Audrey Powers (Rutgers University), “Supervenience Objections to Moral Contingentism”

2023: Abigail Rose Breuker (Columbia University), “Plato on Community and Moral Luck: the stories of Gyges and the Cave,” and Lauren Somers (New York University), “Worries about Ameliorative Engineering”

2022: Yiran Hua (Brown University), “On Being a Good Friend to a Bad Person,” and Saikeerthi “Rani” Rachavelpula (Columbia University), “Modelling Morality: A Kantian Account of Moral Examples”

2021: Carolina Flores (Rutgers University), “Changing Minds with Style,” and Eliana Peck (CUNY Graduate Center), “Performed Credibility Assignments as Epistemic Violence”