Awarded exclusively to students of sociology who are in good academic standing and demonstrate considerable academic merit. For nearly two decades, the department of sociology and anthropology has awarded its C. Wright Mills Award, the highest honor it confers, to a junior or senior sociology major whose work best exemplifies the theories and methods of the field. The recipient will have best demonstrated the "sociological imagination," Mills' (1916-1962) notion of understanding the intersections of biography with history, how what individuals sense to be personal problems are often derived from broad historical change and institutional contradictions.