SLSA awards/prizes (dates indicate date awarded, not necessarily publication date)
Schachterle Prize (best essay by a member who is an untenured scholar)
Brittany Carlson, “Puzzling, effect, and ephemera in ‘The Gold Bug’ and ‘The Man of the Crowd,’ Nineteenth-Century Contexts 2025 (2025)
Madison Jones, “Sylvan Rhetoric in the Planes of Plato’s Phaedrus,” Rhetoric Review 44.1, 2024 (2025)
Cera Smith, “Shocking Therapy: Narrating Racism’s Psychobiological Injuries in Ralph Ellison’s Factory Hospital,” American Literature June 2024. (2024)
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)
Yondong Li, “Peasants, Workers, and Productivity—A Media History of Greenhouse Farming,” 2025
Ethan Plaue, “The Patent Form: Norbert Rillieux, Solomon Northup, and the Production of Means in the Atlantic World”, 2024
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)
Sara Grossman, Immeasurable Weather: Meteorological Data and Settler Colonialism from 1820 to Hurricane Sandy. Duke University Press, 2023. (2024)
Christina Gerhardt, Sea Change: An Atlas of Islands in a Rising Ocean. University of California Press, 2023. (2023, calendar year)
Orit Halpern and Robert Mitchell, The Smartness Mandate (MIT Press), 2023. (2023, conference-to-conference)
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
