Congratulations Kelly Nguyen for winning the inaugural SCS Erich S. Gruen Prize!
Out of 31 submissions, the SCS selection committee unanimously awarded Kelly for her paper “What's in a Natio: Negotiating Ethnic Identity in the Roman Empire”, noting its "thoughtful examination of the individual acts of self-fashioning behind funerary epitaphs specifying a natio." The papers received were all anonymized prior to review by the selection committee. All papers "reflected the temporal and geographical breadth of classical and Near Eastern antiquity and diverse disciplinary perspectives including archaeology, art history, epigraphy, history and philology."
Kelly received her B.A. from Stanford University in 2012 where she double majored in Archaeology and Classics (honors, highest distinction). Her dissertation, “Vercingetorix in Vietnam: Classical Inheritance and Vietnamese Ambivalence,” explores the negotiation of Western imperialism, as mediated by Greco-Roman antiquity, by French-educated Vietnamese communities from the late-19th to mid-20th century.
You can find details about the prize on the SCS website. Congratulations again Kelly!