RSAP gives a biannual award of $1000 in recognition of the best monograph on American periodicals published by an academic press. Books are judged by a peer review of three scholars chosen by the RSAP Advisory Board. Winners and honorable mentions are invited to present their work at the annual RSAP meeting
Book Prize Winners
2021-2022
Jim Crow Networks: African American Periodical Culture by Eurie Dahn
Misinformation Nation: Foreign News and the Politics of Truth in Revolutionary America by Jordan E. Taylor
Honorable Mentions:
- A House for the Struggle: The Black Press and the Built Environment in Chicago by E. James West
2019-2020
Victoria Bazin, Modernism Edited: Marianne Moore and the Dial Magazine (Edinburgh University Press, 2020)
Honorable Mentions:
- Jean Lee Cole, How the Other Half Laughs: The Comic Sensibility in American Culture, 1895-1920
- Samuel Graber, Twice-Divided Nation: National Memory, Transatlantic News, and American Literature in the Civil War Era
- James West, Ebony Magazine and Leroy Bennett Jr.: Popular Black History in Postwar America
- Paul Williams, Dreaming the Graphic Novel: The Novelization of Comics
2017-2018
Kirsten MacLeod, American Little Magazines of the Fin de Siecle: Art, Protest, and Cultural Transformation (University of Toronto Press, 2018)
Honorable Mentions:
- Graham Thompson, Herman Melville among the Magazines
- Thomas Aiello, The Grapevine of the Black South: The Scott Newspaper Syndicate in the Generation Before the Civil Rights Movement
- Agatha Beins, Liberation in Print: Feminist Periodicals and Social Movement Identity
2015-2016
Eric Gardner, Black Print Unbound: The Christian Recorder, African American Literature, and Periodical Culture (Oxford UP, 2015)
Honorable Mentions:
- Elizabeth Groeneveld, Making Feminist Media: Third-Wave Magazines on the Cusp of the Digital Age (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2016)
- Benjamin Fagan, The Black Newsaper and the Chosen Nation (Athens: Univ. Georgia Press, 2016)
- Grant Wythoff, The Perversity of Things: Hugo Gernsback on Media, Tinkering, and Scientification (NY: Columbia UP, 2016)
2013-2014
Tim Lanzendörfer, The Professionalization of the American Magazine: Periodicals, Biography, and Nationalism in the Early Republic. (Schöningh, 2013)
2011-2012
Jared Gardner, The Rise and Fall of Early American Magazine Culture (University of Illinois Press, 2012)
Honorable Mentions:
- Ellen Gruber Garvey, Writing with Scissors: American Scrapbooks from the Civil War to the Harlem Renaissance (Oxford UP, 2012)
Article Prize Winners
2021
Jordan Taylor, “Enquire of the Printer: Newspaper Advertising and the Moral Economy of the North American Slave Trade, 1704-1807,” Early American Studies
Scott Zukowski, “Subversive Editing: Rebellious Reprints in Freedom’s Journal,” Atlantic Studies
Honorable Mentions
Leah Budke, “The Definitive Editor: Alfred Kreymborg and the Others Magazine-Anthology Duo,” Modernist Cultures
Juan Carlos Mezo González, “Consuming the Mexican Body: Gender, Race, and the Nation in Macho Tips, 1985-1989,” Hispanic American Historical Review
2019
McInnis, Jarvis. “A Corporate Plantation Reading Public: Labor, Literacy, and Diaspora in the Global Black South.” American Literature 91.3 (2019): 523–555.
Honorable Mentions
Galvan, Margaret. “‘The Lesbian Norman Rockwell’: Alison Bechdel and Queer Grassroots Networks.” American Literature 90.2 (2018): 407-438.
Sopcak Joseph, Amy. “Reconstructing and Gendering the Distribution Networks of Godey’s Lady’s Book in the Nineteenth Century,” Book History 22 (2019): 161-195.
2018
La Casse, Christopher J. “From the Historical Avant-Garde to Highbrow Coterie Modernism: The Little Review’s Wartime Advances and Retreats.” Criticism 57.4 (2015): 581–608.
Josh Schneiderman, “The New York School, the Mainstream, and the Avant-Garde.” Contemporary Literature 57.3 (2016): 346-378.
Honorable Mentions
Fraser, Gordon. “Emancipatory Cosmology: Freedom’s Journal, The Rights of All, and the Revolutionary Movements of Black Print Culture.” American Quarterly, vol. 68 no. 2, 2016, p. 263-286.
Gray, Paige. “Join the Club: African American Children’s Literature, Social Change, and the Chicago Defender Junior.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, vol. 42 no. 2, 2017, p. 149-168.
2016
Montse Feu, “The US Hispanic Flapper: Pelonas and Flapperismo in Spanish-language Newspapers 1920-1929.” Studies in American Humor Journal. 1.2 (2015): 192-217.
2014
ProQuest/RSAP Article Prize (see call & full announcement)
Ryan Cordell, “‘Taken Possession of’: The Reprinting and Reauthorship of Hawthorne’s ‘Celestial Railroad’ in the Antebellum Religious Press,” Digital Humanities Quarterly 7.1 (2013).
Honorable mentions
Melissa Renn, for “Beyond the ‘Shingle Factory’: The Armory Show in the Popular Press after 1913,” Journal of Curatorial Studies 2.3 (2013): 384-404.
Charlton Yingling, “No One Who Reads the History of Hayti Can Doubt the Capacity of Colored Men: Racial Formation and Atlantic Rehabilitation in New York City’s Early Black Press, 1827–1841,” Early American Studies (11.2) 2013: 314-348.
2012
ProQuest/RSAP Article Prize (see call & full announcement)
James Berkey, “Splendid Little Papers from the ‘Splendid Little War’”: Mapping Empire in the Soldier Newspapers from the Spanish-American War,” Journal of Modern Periodical Studies (3.2) 2012: 158-174.
Honorable mentions
Jessica Isaac, “Youthful Enterprises: Amateur Newspapers and the Pre-History of Adolescence, 1867-1883,” American Periodicals (22.2) 2012: 158-177.
Rochelle Raineri Zuck, “’Yours in the Cause’: Readers, Correspondents and the Editorial Politics of Carlos Montezuma’s Wassaja,” American Periodicals (22.1) 2012: 72-93.
2011
ProQuest/RSAP Article Prize (see call & full announcement)
Benjamin Fagan, “‘Americans As They Really Are’: The Colored American and the Illustration of National Identity.” American Periodicals 21.2
Honorable mentions
Sara Lindey, “Boys Write Back: Self-Education and Periodical Authorship in Late-Nineteenth-Century American Story Papers,” American Periodicals 21.1
Nikhil Bilwakesh, “‘Their faces were like so many of the same sort at home’: American Responses to the Indian Rebellion of 1857,” American Periodicals 21.1
2010
ProQuest/RSAP Article Prize
Sari Edelstein, “‘Metamorphosis of the Newsboy’: E.D.E.N. Southworth’s The Hidden Hand and the Antebellum Story-Paper,” Studies in American Fiction 37.1 (Spring 2010): 29-53)
Honorable Mentions
Isadora Anderson Helfgott, “Art in Life: Fashioning Political Ideology Through Visual Culture in Mid-Century America,” American Periodicals 20.2 (2010): 269-94)
Nadia Nurhussein, “‘On Flow’ry Beds of Ease’: Paul Laurence Dunbar and the Cultivation of Dialect Poetry in the Century,” American Periodicals 20.1 (2010): 46-67)
2009
ProQuest/RSAP Article Prize
Amanda Gailey, University of Nebraska—Lincoln
Honorable Mentions
Christine Holbo, Arizona State University
Cynthia Patterson, University of South Florida Polytechnic