The Environmental Justice Caucus of the American Studies Association invites submissions for this year’s Annette Kolodny Prize. The prize, established in 2002, is awarded each year to the best environmentally-themed paper presented at the American Studies Association annual meeting. Awards are presented at the ASA annual meeting the following year. 

  • Please submit the environmentally-themed paper you presented at ASA 2024.
  • To nominate someone else’s paper, please send the author’s name and email address to any one of the referees below and we will contact them.

Submissions are judged by a panel of referees from the Environmental Justice Caucus. If you would like your environmentally-themed paper from the ASA 2024 annual meeting to be considered for the Kolodny Prize, please send the paper as an email attachment (MS Word preferred) to the referees listed below. Your paper must be received by 11:59 pm Eastern Time on Friday, January 10th. 

Only papers as they were presented at the 2024 ASA annual meeting will be considered. Please do not send book or dissertation chapters on which your paper was based, or any other longer or altered version of your paper. If you would like to include images you showed during the presentation, please incorporate them into the paper, as one document.

Please send your submission to the following referees:

Please feel free to circulate this announcement to colleagues, students, and other lists, and to address any questions to Emma Shaw Crane at emmasc@stanford.edu and Carlos Alonso Nugent at can2162@columbia.edu. We hope to complete the judging and announce the winner sometime in February 2025.

Former Winners of the Annette Kolodny Prize

  • 2002 - Jennifer Mason (Skidmore College), “Animals, Animality, and Nineteenth-Century American Literature: Or, Life in the Built Environment”
  • 2003 - C. Greig Crysler (University of California, Berkeley), “From Flesh to Fiberglass: ‘Cows on Parade’ in Chicago”
  • 2004 - Phoebe Kropp (University of Pennsylvania), “Barefoot, Hungry, and Happy: The Bodily Experiences of Camping”
  • 2005 - Finis Dunaway (Trent University), “Gas Masks, Pogo, and the Ecological Indian: Earth Day and the Visual Politics of American Environmentalism”
  • 2006 - Marina Moskowitz (University of Glasgow), “Quality Adapted to the Country: The Place of Horticulture in the Nineteenth Century”
  • 2007 - Erica Hannickel (University of Iowa), An Agricultural Empire of Grapevines: Grape Culture in Antebellum America”
  • 2008 - Giovanna Di Chiro (Mount Holyoke College), “Polluted Politics? Confronting Toxic Discourse, Sex Panic, and Eco-Normativity”
  • 2009 - Ivan Grabovac (Mount Royal University), “Nativism and Nationhood: Migratory Birds, Immigrants, and the Making of Ecological Citizens”
  • 2009 - Jessica Ramsey (University of California, Santa Barbara), “Floating Communities and Contested Belonging: The Flood Narratives of Hurricane Katrina and Richard Wright”
  • 2010 - Stephanie LeMenager (University of California, Santa Barbara), “Aesthetics of Petroleum II: Petro-Melancholia and Gulf Coast Subsidence”
  • 2011 - Michael Lundblad (Colorado State University), “Animality as Refuge: Terry Tempest Williams and the Biopolitics of Terminal Cancer”
  • 2012 - Megan Black (George Washington University), “Guardians of ‘Global’ Resources: Visualizing Energy and Empire in US Government-Sponsored Film, 1949-1956”
  • 2013 - Natasha Zaretsky (Southern Illinois University), “A Crime Against the Future: Fetal Injury, the Unborn, and the Radiation Scare of the 1950s”
  • 2014 - Jessica Cattelino (University of California, Los Angeles), “The Cultural Politics of Invasive Species in the Florida Everglades”
  • 2015 - Kirsty Robertson (University of Western Ontario) “Oil Futures/Petrotextiles”
  • 2016 - John Levi Barnard (The College of Wooster) “Animal Capital and the Economy of Extinction”
  • 2017 - Bob Johnson (National University) "Coal TV: The Hyperreal Mineral Frontier" 
  • 2018 - Jamie L. Jones (The University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign) “The Great White Whale: White Supremacy and Natural Resource Extraction in early 20th-Century Whaling History”
  • 2019 - Cleo Woelfle-Erskine (University of Washington) “With and for the Multitude: Ecology as Queer Acts”
  • 2021 - Keva X. Bui, "Eugenic Ecologies: Operation Ranch Hand and the Reproductive Politics of Warfare, and Jessica Hurley, "How to Civilize an Ocean"
  • 2022 - Carlos Alonso Nugent, “Mescalero Apache Imagined Environments across the US-Mexico Borderlands” and Emma Shaw Crane “Lush Aftermath: Labor, Landscape, and War in the Suburb”
  • 2023 - Molly Henderson, “Denaturalizing the Family in Environmentalisms of the 1970-1990s” and Aanchal Saraf, “Remaking the Pacific Laboratory”