Past Award Winners

Lois P. Rudnick Book Prize

Mary Kelley Prize

  • 2022 Rachel C. Kirby (Boston University) “‘I’ll Admit that Black is White’: Mr. Peanut’s Accessorized Shell as a Racialized Body”
  • 2021 Noël Ingram (Boston College) “‘Rattle Your Rage’: SisterSerpents’s MadWoman #5, Feminist Anger, and the Aesthetics of Protest. Honorable mention: Grace McGowan (Boston University) “‘This Fault’ring Music Dies Upon My Tongue’: Phillis Wheatley and the Classical Tradition”
  • 2018 Allysha Roth (UMass Boston) “De-hyphenating Americans: The Formation of Citizenship as White Self-Reliance in the Schoolhouse during the Progressive Era.”
  • 2016 Mary Potorti (Emerson College), “What we eat is politics”: SNCC, Hunger, and Voting Rights in Mississippi.” Honorable Mention: Lucas Dietrich (Lesley University), “Writing of a Nation: Zitkala-Ša and the Atlantic Monthly, 1900-1902.”
  • 2014 Tyler Jackson Rogers (Yale University), “The Limits of Recovery: Indigenous Women’s Narratives of Slavery and Murder in Colonial New England”
  • 2011 Breanne Robertson (University of Maryland), “Guardians of San Diego History: Challenging Pan-Americanism in Donal Hord’s Civic Center Sculpture.”
  • 2010 Sheryl Kaskowitz (Harvard University), “God Ble$$ America: Contested Ownership of an Iconic Song.”   
  • 2008 Ziv Eisenberg (Yale University), “Red All Over: Protecting the American Body Politic from Infection in the Early Twentieth Century”; and Stefanie Head (University of Rhode Island, “Framing Freedom: Nation, Empire, and the Renovation of the National Archives Building.”   
  • 2007 Gretchen Sinnett (Salem State College), “A Virgin and Several Nymphomaniacs: Envisioning Female Adolescent Sexuality in the Late Nineteenth Century”; and Whitney Strub (California State University, Fullerton), “Lavender, Menaced: American Obscenity Law and the Suppression of Lesbian Sexuality.”   
  • 2006 Lori Harrison-Kahan (Boston College), “Blackface, White Negress: Sophie Tucker’s Some of These Days.” 
  • 2003 Jennifer Snow (Columbia University), “Caste, Conversion, Citizenship: Missionary Discourse and the Race of the Hindu in the U.S. v. Bhagat Singh Thind.”

Lisa MacFarlane Prize

  • 2021 Jessica Alvarez (Lesley University) “Dolly Parton: Music as Second Wave Activism in Southern Society.”
  • 2018 Alexander Zhang (Yale University) “The First Law of Yellow: How Color Came to Define Citizenship in the Wake of Reconstruction.”
  • 2016 Hannah Jo Dorfman (Tufts University) “Contesting the Faith: Late 20th Century American Evangelicalism in Black and White.”
  • 2014 Margaret Hanson (Brown University), “Remaking American Girl(hood): Fan Reuse, Reinterpretation, Alteration and Expansion of the American Girl Brand.” Honorable Mention: Jessica Sykes (Yale University), “Look At You: The Performance of Race in Contemporary Hip-Hop.”
  • 2011 Tim O’Connor (Boston College), “Deconstructing the Dark Knight: The Role of the Superhero Film in Post-9/11 America” and Zachary Sylvane (Boston University), “The Emersonian Individual.”
  • 2008 Jenny Weissbourd, “Women’s Rights and Women’s Health in the Providence Physiological Society, 1850-1851.”
  • 2007 Joey Fink (University of Massachusetts-Boston), “Rights, Reform, and Respectibility:  New England Working Women’s Claims to Citizenship in the Nineteenth Century” and Maggie O’Keefe (Yale University), “Reclaiming the Reservation: A Case Study of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes’ Land Management Policies on the Flathead Reservation”