Winning the Leathes Prize feels both humbling and galvanising. The essay rose from a refusal to look away - from love and grief, from the fraught complexity of hope and care amid devastation. To have that work recognised affirms that these questions are shared, urgent, and alive - and compels me to keep engaging with difficulty, walking with shadows, and conjuring forms of care fierce enough to survive the storm.
Éile Rasmussen, student on Global Cultures MA
03 September 2025
Global Cultures MA student wins AKC Leathes Prize for essay on love
Éile Rasmussen, student on the Global Cultures MA, has won the AKC Leathes Prize for the Faculty of Arts & Humanities for her essay on the ethic of radical, relational love.
The Associate of King's College London (AKC) is the original award of King's, dating back to its foundation in 1829 and reflecting its first motto: sancte et sapienter, "holiness and wisdom". It is a two-year programme that runs alongside students' main programme of study, aiming to foster an understanding of different beliefs and cultures that can be taken into wider society.
Students who wish to explore a theme from the AKC in more detail can submit a piece of work to the essay competition. The Leathes prize is then awarded to high achieving AKC students in each Faculty based on their essay.
I’m thrilled that Élie has won the Leathes Prize for her brilliant essay. It is a real testament to her hard work and dedication to the AKC and to her studies on the Global Cultures MA. It’s especially great to see an online-learning student take full advantage of what’s on offer within the King’s community.
Dr Alice Hazard, Senior Lecturer in Medieval French Education
Éile responded to the essay topic 'What does it mean to love well in times of crisis?', which related to her MA work on the Gothic as a generative site of relational reworlding.
Love and grief are profoundly entangled forces that cut across cultures - they are the human undercurrent of us all - and yet we often try to minimize or control them because of their disruptive power. This topic invited me to stay with that tension - between darkness and light, despair and hope - and to consider how love can manifest when the world feels most precarious.
Éile Rasmussen, student on Global Cultures MA
Éile chose to complete the AKC as the themes resonate with those of the Global Cultures MA and pressed into timely, real-world questions that broadened and deepened her learning.
As a curious lifelong learning, the AKC felt like an irresistible invitation, offering glimpses into a wide range of insightful, engaging scholars whose work cuts across disciplines.
Éile Rasmussen, student on Global Cultures MA
In this story
Senior Lecturer in Medieval French Education