Recognizes the best new essay on literature and science written in English by a nontenured scholar
Lance Schachterle, founding president of the society, has established an annual prize of $250 in honor of his parents to recognize the best new essay on literature and science written in English by a nontenured scholar. Eligible authors wishing to submit essays (published or accepted for publication) should send them prior to June 1 to SLSA’s Executive Director, Carol Colatrella, LMC, Georgia Institute of Technology via electronic mail to carol.colatrella@lmc.gatech.edu. Please send a copy of your formatted essay as a PDF or Word file, or send a pointer to a URL where the essay is posted.
Note: the Bruns and Schachterle awards are presented during the Business Meeting of the annual fall conference. One may submit only one entry to one of the two essay prize competitions.
Previous Winners
-
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
