Prizes and Grants

2005 Awards Ceremony

The American Studies Association is proud to recognize the continuing high level of scholarship examining our American cultures. The ceremony was held on November 4, 2005, 7:00 PM – 8:00 PM, at the Renaissance DC Hotel. We ask all members of the Association to join in congratulating their fellow members honored at this year’s award ceremony.

The 2005 Constance Rourke Prize

Chair: Gavin Jones, Stanford University
Heinz Ickstadt, Free University of Berlin, Germany
Linda K. Kerber, University of Iowa

The Constance Rourke Prize has been awarded annually since 1987 for the best article published in American Quarterly. George J. Sanchez has been selected as the 2005 prize winner for his article “‘What’s Good for Boyle Heights Is Good for the Jews’: Creating Multiculturalism on the Eastside during the 1950s,” American Quarterly, Volume 56 No. 3 (2004).

Honorable Mention: Elana Zilberg for her article “Fools Banished from the Kingdom: Remapping Geographies of Gang Violence between the Americas (Los Angeles and San Salvador),” in the same issue.

The 2005 Ralph Henry Gabriel Dissertation Prize

Chair: Susan Curtis, Purdue University
Kevin Gaines, University of Michigan
Priscilla Wald, Duke University

The Ralph Henry Gabriel Dissertation Prize, established in 1974, has been awarded annually since 1987 by the Association for the best dissertation in American Studies Alyosha Goldstein for his dissertation, “Civic Poverty: An Empire for Liberty through Community Action,” which he completed at New York University, has been selected as the 2005 prizewinner.

Honorable mentions: Amy Howard, “"More than Shelter: Community, Identity and Spatial Politics in San Francisco Public Housing, 1938-2000,” a dissertation completed at the College of William & Mary,” and Maria Teresa Pool, “"Behind the Chair, The Experience and Meaning of Work in the Lives of Hairdressers,” a dissertation completed at the University of Michigan.

The 2005 Gene Wise - Warren Susman Prize

Chair: Steven Hoelscher, University of Texas at Austin
Michele Elam, Stanford University
Charles Kupfer, Penn State University, Harrisburg

The Gene Wise - Warren Susman Prize is awarded each year for the best paper to be presented by a graduate student at the annual meeting. The winning paper may deal with any aspect of American history, literature, or culture, but should reflect the breadth, the critical imagination, the intellectual boldness, and the cross-disciplinary perspective so strongly a part of the scholarship of both Gene Wise and Warren Susman.

The 2005 prizewinner is Dean Itsuji Saranillio, from Program in American Culture at the University of Michigan. Mr. Saranillio’s paper is entitled: “Kêwaikaliko’s Benocide: Legal Lynchings, Colonialism, and Reversing the Imperial Gaze of Rice v. Cayetano and its Legal Progeny.”

Honorable mentions: Zoe Trodd for her paper, “The Hole Story: Uncovering the basements and garrets of a spatialized modernist identity.” Ms. Trodd is a graduate student in the History of American Civilization Program at Harvard University.

Alexandra Vázquez for her paper, “Contigo en la distancia/ With you in the distance: Havana meets Harlem in Montmartre.” Ms. Vázquez is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Performance Studies at New York University.

The 2005 Yasuo Sakakibara Prize

Chair: Kate Delaney, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Hans Bak, Radboud University, The Netherlands
Tsuyoshi Ishihara, Otemon Gakuin University, Japan

The Yasuo Sakakibara Prize is awarded annually for the best paper to be presented by an international scholar at the annual meeting. The winning paper may deal with any aspect of American history, culture, or society. The 2005 prizewinner is Finis Dunaway, assistant professor of history at Trent University, Peterborough, Ontario, Canada for his paper “Gas Masks, Pogo, and the Ecological Indian: Earth Day and the Visual Politics of American Environmentalism.”

Honorable Mentions: Benita Heiskanen of the University of Helsinki for her paper “On the Ground and Off: A Theoretical Practice"and Sarah Wilson of the University of Toronto for her paper “Space, Metaphor, and Segregation in Jane Jacob’s Social Activism”

The 2005 Lora Romero First Book Publication Prize

Chair: Dana Nelson, Vanderbilt University
John-Michael Rivera, University of Colorado-Boulder
Greg Robinson, Université du Québec a Montréal

The Lora Romero First Book Publication Prize was established in 2002 and is awarded annually for the best-published first book in American Studies that highlights the intersections of race with gender, class, sexuality and/or nation. Mae M. Ngai’s Impossible Subjects: Aliens and the Making of Modern America. (Princeton University Press) has been selected as the 2005 prizewinner.

Honorable mention to Anna Brickhouse’s Transamerican Literary Relations and the Nineteenth-Century Public Sphere (Cambridge University Press)

The 2005 John Hope Franklin Publication Prize

Chair: Lillian Robinson, Concordia University, Canada
Farah Jasmine Griffin, Columbia University
Reinhold Wagnleitner, University of Salzburg, Austria

The John Hope Franklin Publication Prize was established in 1986 and has been awarded annually for the best book published in American Studies. Premilla Nadasen’s Welfare Warriors: The Welfare Rights Movement in the United States (Routledge) has been selected as the 2005 prizewinner.

Penny M. Von Eschen’s Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War (Harvard University Press) has been named the first runner up.

Honorable mentions to Stephanie Camp for Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (University of North Carolina Press), Melvin Patrick Ely for Israel on the Appomattox: A Southern Experiment in Black Freedom from the 1790s through the Civil War (Knopf), and Janet Zandy for Hands: Physical Labor, Class, and Cultural Work (Rutgers University Press).

The 2005 Mary C. Turpie Award

Chair: Emory Elliott, University of California, Riverside
Doris Friedensohn, Jersey City State University
Allan Winkler, Miami University

Annually, the American Studies Association gives the Mary C. Turpie Award, established in 1993, to a person who has demonstrated outstanding abilities and achievement in American Studies teaching, advising, and program development at the local or regional level. The Turpie Award Committee has selected Joanna S. Zangrando of Skidmore College, as the 2005 prizewinner.

The 2005 Carl Bode-Norman Holmes Pearson Prize

Chair: Elaine Tyler May, University of Minnesota
Gordon Hutner, University of Illinois
James A. Miller, George Washington University

The Carl Bode-Norman Holmes Pearson Prize honors lifetime achievement in and contribution to the field of American Studies. Each year’s prize committee is instructed to consider afresh the meaning of a “lifetime contribution to American Studies.” The definitions of terms like “contribution” and even of “American Studies” remain open, healthily contested, and thus renewed. This year’s committee can testify to the wisdom of the ASA’s approach.

The Bode-Pearson Prize Committee has selected Lois W. Banner of the University of Southern California, as the winner of the 2005 prize.