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Award Winners

SLSA awards/prizes (dates indicate date awarded, not necessarily publication date)

Schachterle Prize (best essay by a member who is an untenured scholar)

  • Nathaniel Otjen, “Habituated Knowledges: The Entanglements of Science, Species, and Selfhood,” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies October 2022. (2023)
  • Michelle Nancy Hwang, “Racial Disintegration: Biomedical Futurity at the Environmental Limit,” American Literature, Volume 93, Number 3, September 2021. (2022)
  • Amanda K. Greene, “The Passing Hour: 1930s Real-Time, Vile Bodies, and the Ethics of Reading”, Configurations Vol. 29.2, 2021
  • Joshua DiCaglio, “Scale Tricks and God Tricks, or, the Power of Scale in the Powers of Ten,” Configurations Vol. 28.4, 2020
  • Paul Benzon, “Weather Permitting: Shelley Jackson’s Snow and the Ecopoetics of the Digital,” College Literature, Vol. 46.1, 2019
  • Michael Tondre, “The Impassive Novel: ‘Brain-Building’ in Walter Pater’s Marius the Epicurean,” PMLA (volume 133), 2018
  • Dahlia Porter, “Specimen Poetics: Botany, Reanimation, and the Romantic Collection,” Representations (July 2017), 2017
  • John Hay, “A Poet of the Land: William Cullen Bryant and Moundbuilder Ecology, ” 2016
  • Debapriya Sarkar, “‘Sad Experiment’ in Paradise Lost: Epic Knowledge and Evental Poetics,” 2015
  • Inge Hinterwaldner, “Parallel Lines as Tools of Making Turbulence Visible,” 2014
  • Bradley Fest, “The Inverted Nuke in the Garden: Archival Emergence and Anti-Eschatology in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest”, 2013
  • Kieran Murphy, “Electromagnetic Thoughts in Balzac, Villiers de Isle-Adam, and Joseph Breuer”, 2012
  • Bernard Geoghegan, “From Information Theory to French Theory: Jakobsen, Levi-Strauss, and the Cybernetic Apparatus”, 2011
  • Catherine Belling, “Narrating Oncogenesis”, 2010
  • (Shared) Allison de Fren, “The Anatomical Gaze in Tomorrow’s Eve”, and Mara Mills “Deaf Jam: From Inscription to Reproduction to Information”, 2009
  • (Shared) Joseph Drury, “Haywood’s Thinking Machines”, and John Shanahan, “Ben Jonson’s Alchemist and Early Modern Laboratory Space”, 2008
  • Henning Schmidgen, “The Donders Machine: Matter, Signs, and Time in a Physiological Experiment”, 2007
  • Susan McHugh, “The Call of the Other 0.1%: Genetic Aesthetics and the new Moreaus”, 2006
  • Richard Menke, “Media in America, 1881: Garfield, Guiteau, Bell, Whitman”, 2005
  • Dennis Desroches, “Phenomenology, Science Studies, and the Question of Being”, 2004
  • Maura Brady, “Galileo in Action: The Telescope in Paradise Lost”, 2003
  • Sujata Iyengar, “Royalist, Romanticist, Racialist: Rank, Gender, and Race in the Science and Fiction of Margaret Cavendish”, 2002
  • Mark Hansen, “Embodying Virtual Reality: Touch and Self-Movement in the Work of Char Davies”, 2001
  • Richard Menke, “Fiction as Vivisection: G. H. Lewes and George Eliot”, 2000
  • Jennifer Tuttle, “Rewriting the West Cure: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Owen Wister, and the Sexual Politics of Neurasthenia”, 1999

 Edwin Bruns Prize (best essay by a graduate student member)

  • Henry Osman, “Pure Hardware, or Affect and Ideology on the Analog Circuit, 2023
  • Doug Stark, “Playing with Habit: David Sudnow’s Video Game Pilgrimage”, 2022
  • Akrish Adhikari, “Writing as Biometric: The Case of Graphology and Keystroke Dynamics”, 2021
  • Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal, “On addressability, or what even is computing?”, 2020
  • Sarah Ciston, “Whispering into the Void Loop (): Co-Writing with AI, Error as Poetics,” 2019
  • Peter M. Flannery, “Silver Linings: Visualising the (Post) Anthropocene, Technology, and Post-Human in Photography,” 2018
  • Dagmar Van Engen, “Disordered Time and Alien Natural Law: Queer Invertebrate Evolution in At the Mountain of Madness,” 2017
  • Michelle Huang, “Ecologies of Entanglement in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch,” 2016
  • Brittany Roberts for her essay “Touching Bare Life in the ‘Corridor of Absolute Dying’: Biopolitics, Necrorealism, and Resistance in Evgenii Iufit’s ‘Spring,’” 2015
  • Julian Gill-Peterson,“The Technical Capabilities of the Body: Assembling Race, Technology, and Transgender”, 2014
  • Aleksandra Hernandez, “William Carlos Williams’s Spring and All and the Poetics of Noise”, 2013
  • Karalyn Kendall-Morwick, “Dogging the Subject: Samuel Beckett, Emmanuel Levinas, and Posthumanist Ethics”, 2012
  • Jessica Kuskey, “Our Mutual Engine”, 2011
  • David Cecchetto, “Performing Deconstruction: Posthumanism, Primary Affectivity and Mark Hansen’s Media Theory”, 2010
  • Stephanie Boluk, “Seriality, the Literary and Database in Homestar Runner: Some Old Issues in New Media”, 2009
  • Sean Miller, “Imagining Braneworlds in String Theory Technical Discourse”, 2008
  • Bernard Geoghegan, “Against Embodiment: Gesture Amidst Technics and Embodied Agents”, 2007
  • Vera Bühlmann, “Intelligent Skin: Real Virtual”, 2006
  • Benjamin Robertson, “On Moral Science: The Problematic Politics of Stuart Kauffman’s Order”, 2005
  • Jodie Nicotra, “Darwinian Seductions: John Campbell, Samuel Butler, and the Rhetoric of Fascination”, 2004
  • Colin Milburn, “Nanotechnology in the Age of Posthuman Engineering: Science Fiction and Science”, 2003
  • Benjamin Cohen, “The Element of the Table: Reading and Representing the Visual Discourse of Chemical Practices”, 2002
  • Carol Wald, “The Fairy in the Net: Agency, Class, and Evolution in the Letters of Ada Byron Lovelace”, 2001
  • Rebecca Knell, 2000
  • Douglas Davis, “A Hundred Million Hydrogen Bombs: The Cold-War Science of Geological Catastrophism”, 1999

Kendrick Prize (best book published by a member)

  • Orit Halpern and Robert Mitchell, The Smartness Mandate (MIT Press), 2023
    • Honorable Mention: Kevis Goodman, Pathologies of Motion: Historical Thinking in Medicine, Aesthetics and Poetics (Yale UP)
  • Tobias Menely, Climate and the Making of Worlds: Toward a Geohistorical Poetics (University of Chicago Press), 2022
    • Honorable Mention: Michael Black, Transparent Designs: Personal Computing and the Politics of User-Friendliness (Johns Hopkins University Press)
    • Honorable Mention: Alan Stoekl, The Three Sustainabilities: Energy, Economy, Time (University of Minnesota Press)
    • Honorable Mention: Heather Davis, Plastic Matter (Duke University Press)
    • Bob Markley coordinated judging the Kendrick book prize
  • Banu Subramaniam, Holy Science: The Biopolitics of Hindu Nationalism (University of Washington Press), 2020
  • Arielle Saiber, Measured Words: Computation and Writing in Renaissance Italy (University of Toronto Press), 2019
  • Julian Yates, Of Sheep, Oranges, and Yeast: A Multispecies Impression (University of Minnesota Press), 2017
  • Stefan Helmreich, Sounding the Limits of Life: Essays in the Anthropology of Biology and Beyond, 2016
  • Gillen D’Arcy Wood, Tambora: The Eruption that Changed the World, 2015
  • Robert Mitchell, Experimental Life: Vitalism in Romantic Science and Literature, 2014
  • Catherine Belling, A Condition of Doubt: The Meaning of Hypochrondria, 2013
  • Susan McHugh, Animal Stories: Narrating across Species Lines, 2012
  • Susan Squier, Poultry Science, Chicken Culture: A Partial Alphabet, 2011
  • Laura Dassow Walls, The Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America, 2010
  • Stefan Andriopoulos, Possessed: Hypnotic Crimes, Corporate Fiction, and the Invention of Cinema, 2009
  • Ralph O’Connor, The Earth on Show: Fossils and the Poetics of Popular Science, 2008
  • Barbara Maria Stafford, Echo Objects: The Cognitive Work of Images, 2007

SLSA Lifetime Achievement Award

  • Roald Hoffmann, 2022
  • Sally Shuttleworth, 2021
  • Richard Powers, 2020
  • Donna Haraway, 2019
  • Susan Squier, 2018
  • Sidney Perkowitz, 2015
  • Linda Dalrymple Henderson, 2014
  • Katherine Hayles, 2013
  • George Lewis Levine, 2012
  • Friedrich Kittler, 2011
  • Barbara Herrnstein Smith, 2010

Special Commendation