From the estate of Thomas T. Hoopes, Class of 1919, Harvard received a fund from which to grant annual awards to undergraduates on the basis of outstanding scholarly work or research. Mr. Hoopes was Curator of the City Art Museum in St. Louis for over 25 years. He was an expert on firearms, from the crossbow of the 16th century to modern handguns, and wrote widely in the field.

The fund provides undergraduate prizes to be given for the purpose of “promoting, improving, and enhancing the quality of education . . . in literary, artistic, musical, scientific, historical, or other academic subjects made part of the College curriculum under [f]aculty supervision and instruction, particularly by recognizing, promoting, honoring, and rewarding excellence in the work of undergraduates and their capabilities and skills in any subject, projects of research in science or the humanities, or in specific written work of the students under the instruction or supervision of the [f]aculty.”

Student winners are awarded $5,000, and faculty nominators of winning projects are awarded $2,000. Written winning projects are bound and available in Lamont Library for two years.

The following prize recipients received CES funding to conduct research for their senior theses during the summer of 2026:

Allison Jones (History, Secondary Field in Government, 2026) for her submission: “By Any Means Necessary: Land Dispossession,Forced Removal, and Cultural Survival in the Scottish Highlands and the Cherokee Nation, 1807–1839”

Sofia Melnychuck (Applied Mathematics, Slavic Languages & Literatures, 2026) for her submission: "Subword Tokenization for Low Resource,Morphologically Rich Languages: A Morphologically Constrained Tokenizer for Lithuanian"

Therese Wayland (English, Secondary Field in European History, Politics, and Societies, 2026) for her submission: "Feuilleton Submits to Walter Benjamin: Reading: Between Deification and Debasement in the Fragments of One-Way Street and Berlin Childhood"