2026 Oliver W. Koonz Human Rights Prize Winners Announced
From the 2026 Oliver W. Koonz Human Rights Prize Judges
Professors Claudia Koonz, Adam Rosenblatt, Betsy Albright, and Wylin Wilson
We are excited to award the 2026 Oliver W. Koonz Human Rights Prize to two outstanding students: Phoenix Chapital, for her essay "In Defense of Love and Letters: Epistolary Resistance in This is How You Lose the Time War;" and Mariana Meza, for her essay "Criminality in United States Immigration Discourse."
Honorable mentions: Mia Bella Paz, Silvio Luiz Antunes da Silva, Cecelia Wasco
Phoenix Chapital
Phoenix Chapital’s essay, “In Defense of Love and Letters: Epistolary Resistance in This is How You Lose the Time War,” written for Prof. Robin Kirk’s “Imagining Human Rights” course, analyzes a futuristic text about time travelers. Yet Chapital shows just how beautifully crafted the story is for our contemporary moment, for this timeline, where many of us find ourselves lonely and overwhelmed, feeling like all we can do is lose. This is How You Lose the Time War unfolds as a series of letters between two deadly agents who travel along strands of time to serve the interests of their two warring, futuristic empires—but who ultimately, over the course of their letters, fall in love and plot a final, desperate act of resistance. Chapital argues that the book is “a critical examination of what it means to be human in a post-human world.” She finds, in its epistolary format, a tribute to letter-writing as a queer, intimate art, allowing the two lovers to construct a private world, undiscovered (for a time) and uncontained by surveillance capitalism. Drawing on Édouard Glissant’s concept of “the right to opacity,” she writes, “being vulnerable, nebulous, and indiscernible is a form of resistance against oppressive realities”—a timely defense of everything that authentic human thought and creativity can do, and an AI-supercharged internet cannot. Chapital urges us to think, counterintuitively, about what wars and contests we might need to lose to save our humanity: whether we really want to be racing towards a disembodied world of mutual, constant surveillance.
It can be challenging to write analytically about texts as lyrical and emotive as This is How You Lose the Time War; the prose of the critic often seems lifeless compared to the text they are analyzing. This is not the case for Chapital. From her riffs on the book’s title in the headings of her essay (“How They Lose the Time War”; “How We Lose the Time War”) to her own exquisite turns of phrase (“The suggestion is that there is perhaps nothing to be won by winning. But there is something to be won by loving.”), Chapital seems not merely to be writing about This is How You Lose the Time War but writing with it—sending her own love letter to the agents Blue and Red, wherever in time they may be, and promising that their resistance was worth it. It’s up to us to make it so—to lose the time war together.
Mariana Meza
On one side, a president who rose to prominence comparing Mexican immigrants to rapists, and whose administration has empowered masked agents to sweep through American cities, employing racial profiling, violating constitutional rights, and carrying out extrajudicial executions. On the other side, critics who complain that the president has betrayed a promise only to deport criminals—the “worst of the worst”—a project whose legitimacy they reinforce even as they call for restraint. In “Criminality in United States Immigration Discourse” (written for Prof. Dominika Baran’s “Language in Immigrant America” course), Mariana Meza shows how these two sides are partners in a dance—one embedded deep in the history of our country—where immigrants, especially immigrants of color, are depicted as criminals, and criminals are rendered as disposable, rightless. Meza explains how, since the late 1800s, the “cultural fabrication” that immigrants were more likely to break the law, though forever unproven, “gradually developed into a legislated reality” in which undocumented status is, itself, misconstrued as a criminal offense. Drawing on history, linguistics, and semiotics, Meza convincingly describes how dominant systems perpetuate this myth and make it pervasive in our culture—how the association between “criminality, immigration, and certain racial and linguistic features becomes common sense and appears as natural and inevitable.” Meza also trains her courageous, critical eye on activist discourse. She powerfully argues that the claim “immigrants are not criminals” sets up a binary of “good” and “bad” immigrants while “reduc[ing] immigrants with criminal records to individuals unworthy of justice.” It also shifts attention away from how the state has long wielded its power to determine what criminality is—and “which immigrants count as criminals”—as a tool of racial oppression.
To have a truly free country, Meza argues, we need to find our way out of this whole system of representations, “enacting new narrative strategies.” Our discourses about criminality, as well as the anti-immigrant rhetoric that brought Trump to power, must be critiqued, torn down, and built into something new.
The Oliver W. Koonz Human Rights Prize is awarded annually to the two best essays/papers/alternative projects prepared by an undergraduate for the academic year.