Humanities Book Prize Archives

Susanne M. Glasscock Humanities Book Prize for Interdisciplinary Scholarship Archives

Nineteenth Annual Book Prize (2018)

Ruth Carbonette Yow, an historian and ethnographer of justice struggles and public education, is the recipient of the Nineteenth Annual Susanne M. Glasscock Humanities Book Prize for Interdisciplinary Scholarship for her book Students of the Dream: Resegregation in a Southern City, published by Harvard University Press in 2017.

Yow is participating in a Community Q&A, facilitated by Dr. Pat Rubio Goldsmith, at the Brazos Valley African American Museum on Wednesday, March 27, 2019. On the following day, Yow will present a talk and receive her prize at the Glasscock Center Library.

Eighteenth Annual Book Prize (2016)

Mark Greif, Associate Professor of Literary Studies at The New School, is the recipient of the Eighteenth Annual Susanne M. Glasscock Humanities Book Prize for Interdisciplinary Scholarship for his book The Age of the Crisis of Man: Thought and Fiction in America, 1933-1973, published by the Princeton University Press in 2015.

The external reader for the eighteenth book prize was Dr. Sabine Hake, Texas Chair of German Literature and Culture, University of Texas at Austin

Seventeenth Annual Book Prize (2015)

Natalia Molina, Professor of History and Urban Studies at the University of California, San Diego, is the recipient of the Seventeenth Annual Susanne M. Glasscock Humanities Book Prize for Interdisciplinary Scholarship for her book How Race Is Made in America: Immigration, Citizenship, and the Historical Power of Racial Scripts, published by the University of California Press in 2014.

The external reader for the seventeenth book prize was Debra A. Castillo, Emerson Hinchliff Chair of Hispanic Studies and Professor of Comparative Literature at Cornell University.

Sixteenth Annual Book Prize (2014)

Raúl Coronado, Associate Professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, received the Sixteenth Annual Susanne M. Glasscock Humanities Book Prize for Interdisciplinary Scholarship for his book A World Not to Come: A History of Latino Writing and Print Culture, published by the Harvard University Press in 2013.

The external reader for the sixteenth book prize was Colleen Boggs, Professor of English and Director of Leslie Center for the Humanities at Dartmouth College.

Fifteenth Annual Book Prize (2013)

Gabrielle Hecht, Professor of History and Director of the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at the University of Michigan, received the fifteenth book prize for her book Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade, published by the MIT Press in 2012.

The external reader for the fifteenth book prize was Mary Jean Green, Edward Tuck Professor of French Professor of Comparative Literature, Dartmouth University.

Fourteenth Annual Book Prize (2012)

Simon Gikandi, Robert Schirmer Professor of English at Princeton University received the fourteenth book prize for his book Slavery and the Culture of Taste, published by Princeton University Press in 2011. Gikandi gave a public lecture entitled “Slavery and Modern Identity” and accepted the book prize on 27 February 2013.

The external reader for the fourteenth book prize was David William Foster, Regents’ Professor of Spanish and Women’s and Gender Studies at Arizona State University. Foster gave a public lecture on 28 February 2013 entitled “Guille and Belinda: A Lesbian Arcadian Romance, a Photobook by Allesandra Sanguinetti.”

Thirteenth Annual Book Prize (2011)

Karla Mallette, Associate Professor of Italian and Near Eastern Studies and Associate Director of the Center for Middle Eastern and North African Studies at the University of Michigan, was awarded for her book, European Modernity and the Arab Mediterranean: Toward a New Philology and a Counter-Orientalism(University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010). European Modernity book cover

Mallette gave a pubic lecture and accepted the book prize for 2011 on Wednesday, 15 February 2012.

In her book, European Modernity and the Arab Mediterranean: Toward a New Philology and a Counter-Orientalism (University of Pennsylvania Press), Karla Mallette offers an important and timely contribution to our understanding of the history and nature of European modernity and its intimate, if complicated and frequently contested, relationship to the history of the medieval Arab Mediterranean world. Marking a sharp distinction between northern European orientalism (so influentially critiqued by Edward Said and postcolonial critics) and its southern European version practiced by Italian, Spanish, and Maltese scholars in the years between 1850 and 1950, Mallette draws a richly detailed and exemplary study of the scholars and the scholarship that sought to excavate this vital Islam/Arab contribution to the project of modernity largely forgotten (or obscured) for centuries. Mallette’s analysis of the story that these works tell recasts Arab history and Islamic thought, not as the West’s irreducible ‘other,’ but rather as generative forces integral to the very founding of European identity, nation, and modernity itself. Mallette’s narrative is dedicated as well to her analysis of the crucial role modern philology played in this recovery of history and identity. As such, Mallette’s book offers a fresh and exciting new understanding of the place of philology within European intellectual history that necessarily rethinks traditional disciplinary methodologies and the relationship between them. The result is a vigorous and supple multidisciplinary study that allows us to see new aspects of a European history too often taken for granted; that re-introduces us to historical and literary figures we thought we knew but see here, possibly for the first time; and that, by re-theorizing orientalism, enriches our understanding not only of the medieval Mediterranean, but also perhaps our own particular historical moment.

The outside reader on the Glasscock Book Prize committee, Howard Marchitello, Associate Professor of English, Rutgers University presented a lecture entitled “The Macbeth Bubble” on Thursday, 16 February 2012.

Twelfth Annual Book Prize (2010)

Matt Cohen, Associate Professor of English at the University of Texas, was awarded for his book, The Networked Wilderness: Communicating in Early New England (The University of Minnesota Press, 2009).

Networked Wilderness book cover Cohen gave a pubic lecture and accepted the book prize for 2010 on Wednesday, 9 February 2011.

In The Networked Wilderness: Communicating in Early New England, published by the University of Minnesota Press, Cohen invites readers to understand anew the systems of communication in play in seventeenth-century New England, to understand encounters between Native Americans and colonists in terms of communications technologies beyond the oral-literate divide that has shaped much of our sense of early American history. Cohen insists that we see in New England’s early history multiple contests for control over communication networks. These networks, he argues, involved various forms of communicative practice, including traps, paths, monuments, and medical rituals, for both Natives and English.

The outside reader on the Glasscock Book Prize committee, John O’Brien, Associate Professor of English at the University of Virginia presented a lecture entitled “Insurance: Persons, Things, Sentiment.”

Eleventh Annual Book Prize (2009)

Wood accepting the book prize

Christopher S. Wood, Professor of the History of Art, Yale University, was awarded for his book, Forgery, Replica, Fiction: Temporalities of German Renaissance Art (The University of Chicago Press, 2008).

Forgery Replica Fiction book cover Wood gave a public lecture and accepted the book prize for 2009 on Wednesday, 17 February 2010.

In Forgery, Replica, Fiction: Temporalities of German Renaissance Art, published by the University of Chicago Press, Christopher Wood has crafted an engrossing study of how thinking about ideas of time, art, and originality were transformed by the advent of new technologies, such as woodcut, copper engraving, and movable type, which made mass replication possible.

The outside reader on the Glasscock Book Prize committee, Susan Amussen, Professor in the School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts at University of California, Merced, made a presentation entitled “Violence, Gender and Race in the Seventeenth-Century English Atlantic.”

Tenth Annual Book Prize (2008)

Maggie Nelson accepts book prize

Maggie Nelson (Critical Studies, California Institute of the Arts) was awarded for her book, Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions (University of Iowa Press, 2007).

Nelson gave a public lecture and accepted the book prize for 2008 on Wednesday, 4 March 2009.

Women the New York School book cover In Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions, Nelson takes a close, critical look at the New York School of Poets, which emerged after the Second World War, with a focus on the movement’s women poets and their collaborative role in expanding the techniques and critiques of New York’s artistic avant-garde. Women, the New York School and Other True Abstractions, engages conversations about the interplay of gender, sexuality, and the creative process, as well as offering new insights into the formation and delineation of artistic movements. Professor Nelson is also known for several books of poetry and for The Red Parts: A Memoir, an autobiographical work which examines her family, criminal justice, and the media.

The outside reader on the Glasscock Book Prize committee, Paul Jones(Ohio University) made a presentation entitled “The Americanization of Jack Sheppard: Antebellum Crime Fiction and Anti-Gallows Sympathy.”

Ninth Annual Book Prize (2007)

Lois Parkinson Zamora, Professor of Comparative Literature and Art History at the University of Houston, was awarded for her book The Inordinate Eye: New World Baroque and Latin American Fiction (University of Chicago Press, 2006). Zamora gave a public lecture and accepted the book prize for 2007 on Wednesday, 13 February 2008.

Zamora gave a public lecture, “The Baroque Self: Frida Kahlo and Gabriel García Márquez,” and accepted the book prize for 2007 on Wednesday, 13 February 2008.

The outside reader on the Glasscock Book Prize committee, Suzanne Poirier (University of Illinois at Chicago), made a presentation entitled “Stories Out of School: Memoirs and the Emotional Education of Medical Students.”

Eighth Annual Book Prize (2006)

Beth Fowkes Tobin, the Department of English at Arizona State University, for her monograph, Colonizing Nature: The Tropics in British Arts and Letters, 1760-1820, published in 2005 by the University of Pennsylvania Press.

The presentation of the prize and Professor Tobin’s public lecture, “The Duchess’s Shells: Accumulation, Exchange, and Regimes of Value in Natural History Collecting,” took place on 7 February, 2007.

The outside reader on the Glasscock Book Prize committee, Stacy Wolf, professor of theatre at the University of Texas, made a presentation entitled “‘We’re Not in Kansas Anymore’: The Broadway Musical, Women, and Wicked.”

Seventh Annual Book Prize (2005)

Hillbilly book cover Anthony Harkins, Assistant Professor of History, Western Kentucky University, for his book Hillbilly: A Cultural History of an American Icon, (Oxford University Press, 2004). He presented a paper entitled, “Flyover Country’ and the Politics of Imagining the ‘Middle of Nowhere.’”

The outside reader on the Glasscock Book Prize committee, William Cohen, professor of English at the University of Maryland, made a presentation entitled “Inside Hopkins.”‘Flyover Country’ and the Politics of Imagining the ‘Middle of Nowhere.’”

Sixth Annual Book Prize (2004)

Jay Clayton, William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor and Chair of the Department of English at Vanderbilt University for his book Charles Dickens in Cyberspace: The Afterlife of the Nineteenth Century in Postmodern Culture, (Oxford University Press, 2003). He presented a paper entitled, “Crimes of the Genome: Literature and the Gene for Violence.”

The outside reader on the Glasscock Book Prize committee, Debbie Nelson, professor at the University of Chicago, made a presentation entitled “Cold Comfort: Simone Weil in Postwar America.”

Fifth Annual Book Prize (2003)

Slavery & The Romantic Imagination book cover

Debbie Lee, Assistant Professor of English at Washington State University, for her book Slavery and the Romantic Imagination(University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002). She presented a public lecture entitled, “Imperialism and Impostors: The Notorious Case of Princess Caraboo.”

The outside reader on the Glasscock Book Prize committee, Brian Cowan, Assistant Professor, Department of History, Yale University, made a presentation titled “An Open Elite: Virtuosity and Peculiarities of English Connoisseurship.”

Fourth Annual Book Prize (2002)

Keith Wailoo, of the Department of History and the Institute for Health, Health Care Policy, and Aging Research at Rutgers University, for his book Dying in the City of the Blues: Sickle Cell Anemia and the Politics of Race and Health (The University of North Carolina Press, 2001). He presented a public lecture entitled, “From White Plague to Black Death: The Strange Career of Race & Cancer in 20th Century America.”

The outside reader on the Glasscock Book Prize committee, Audrey Jaffe, Center for Cultural Studies, UC-Santa Cruz, made a presentation titled “Bodies on the Line: Figures of Nineteenth-Century Studies.”

Third Annual Book Prize (2001)

Daniel Albright, Richard L. Turner Professor in the Humanities, University of Rochester, for his book Untwisting the Serpent: Modernism in Music, Literature, and Other Arts (The University of Chicago Press, 2000). He presented a public lecture entitled “Noble Savages in Armani Suits: Poetry, Painting, and Music in Late Twentieth-Century America.”

The outside reader on the Glasscock Book Prize committee, Samuel Gladden, Assistant Professor of English at the University of Northern Iowa, also made a presentation titled “Lacunae and Textual Summation: Absences, Gaps, and Other Sexy Spaces in the British Nineteenth Century.”

Second Annual Book Prize (2000)

Mary Baine Campbell, Professor of English at Brandeis University, for her book, Wonder and Science: Imagining Worlds in Early Modern Europe (Cornell University Press, 1999). She accepted the award and delivered a public lecture entitled “Dreaming, Motion, Meaning: Oneiric Transport in Seventeenth-Century England.” Wonder and Science also won the Modern Language Associations James Russell Lowell Prize in 2001. Dr. Campbell also received a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship for her research in 2002.

First Annual Book Prize (1999)

Dana D. Nelson, Professor of English and Social Theory at the University of Kentucky, for her book, National Manhood: Capitalist Citizenship and the Imagined Fraternity of White Men (Duke University Press, 1998). She accepted the award and delivered a public lecture entitled “Representative/Democracy: Presidential Management and Civic Identity.”