CAAS awards two annual prizes:
- The Ernest Redekop prize for best article published in the previous year in the Canadian Review of American Studies.
- The Robert K. Martin prize for best book published by a CAAS member in the previous calendar year.
The Robert K. Martin prize is awarded to the best book published by a CAAS member in the previous calendar year. CAAS is now accepting nominations for the Robert K. Martin prize for best book published in 2023. The deadline for submissions is September 30, 2024. All submissions should be sent directly to:
Jennifer Harris (Robert K. Martin Prize Committee Chair)
English Language and Literature
200 University Avenue West
University of Waterloo
Waterloo, ON N2L 3G1
Tel: (519) 888-4567 ext. 36803
We require 3 paper copies of book submissions; please email Jennifer Harris (jennifer.harris@uwaterloo.ca) to confirm details of your nomination for the Martin prize prior to sending the books.
2022 Winner
Redekop prize winner (2022)
The committee charged with selecting the winner of this year’s Redekop Prize for the best essay in volume 52 (2022) of the Canadian Review of American Studies have decided to give the award to Shama Rangwala of the Department of Humanities at York University for her essay, “Liberal Containment in Marvel Movies of the Trump Era” (CRAS 522). Rangwala’s essay interrogates the ostensibly progressive politics of two of the most commercially successful titles in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (Black Panther [2018] and Captain Marvel [2019]), in order to demonstrate how they ultimately serve to neutralize criticism of liberal hegemony. In the context of Trump’s Presidency, she argues, these MCU films help to perpetuate the self-serving liberal idea that oppressive ideas and practices are “not foundational,” but are “embodied within the villainous individual . . . and can thus be expelled with that individual.” By addressing the intersections of race, class, and gender in the context of US empire, Rangwala locates her work at the center of American Studies scholarship. The committee agreed that her careful theoretical framing, her engagement with recent and relevant work in the field of American popular culture and her close attention to the chosen cinematic texts combined to generate an elegant and compelling argument.
Paul Downes (University of Toronto)
David Hollingshead (MacEwan University)
David Mitterauer (Western University)
2021 Winner
Robert K. Martin Book Prize Winner & Honourable Mentions:
- WINNER: Xine Yao, Disaffected: The Cultural Politics of Unfeeling in Nineteenth-Century America (Duke UP, 2021)
- HONOURABLE MENTIONS (in alphabetical order): Katherine McKittrick, Dear Science and Other Stories (Duke UP, 2021) and Sandra Tomc, Fashion Nation: Picturing the United States in the Long Nineteenth Century (U of Michigan P, 2021)
Ernest Redekop Essay Prize Winner & Honourable Mentions
- WINNER: Mason Wales, “’We Couldn’t Do That Even if We Wanted To’: Family and Natality in Veep and House of Cards (US)” (CRAS 51.3).
2019-2020 Winners
Robert K. Martin Book Prize Winner & Honourable Mentions
- WINNER: Jason Demers, The American Politics of French Theory: Derrida, Deleuze, Guattari, and Foucault in Translation (University of Toronto Press).
- HONOURABLE MENTION: Giorgio Bertellini, The Divo and the Duce: Promoting Film Stardom and Political Leadership in 1920s America (University of California Press).
- HONOURABLE MENTION: Laura R. Fisher, Reading for Reform: The Social Work of Literature in the Progressive Era (University of Minnesota Press).
2020 Winners
Ernest Redekop Essay Prize Winner & Honourable Mentions
- WINNER: Brian Jansen, “’It’s Still Real to Me’: Contemporary Professional Wrestling, Neo-Liberalism, and the Problems of Performed/Real Violence” (CRAS 50.2).
- HONOURABLE MENTION: Jason Haslam, “Chain-Gang Gothic: The Colonel’s Dream and the Spectacular Terrors of State Punishment” (CRAS 50.2).
2019 Winners
Ernest Redekop Essay Prize Winner & Honourable Mentions
- WINNER: Carole Lynn Stewart, for “Iola’s War on Alcohol, Lynching, and the Rise of the Carceral State” (CRAS 49.2).
- HONOURABLE MENTIONS: Cheryl Thompson, for “Locating ‘Dixie’ in Newspaper Discourse and Theatrical Performance in Toronto, 1880s to 1920s” (CRAS 49.2); and Yeonsik Jung, for “Why Is Melanctha Black?: Gertrude Stein, Physiognomy, and the Jewish Question” (CRAS 49.2).
2018 Winners
Robert K. Martin Book Prize Winner & Honourable Mentions
- WINNER: Brad Congdon, for Leading with the Chin: Writing American Masculinities in Esquire, 1960-1989 (University of Toronto Press, 2018).
- HONOURABLE MENTIONS: Natasha Hurley for Circulating Queerness: Before the Gay and Lesbian Novel (The University of Minnesota Press, 2018); and Karen E. H. Skinazi for “Women of Valor: Orthodox Jewish Troll Fighters, Crime Writers, and Rock Stars in Contemporary Culture”(MELUS 44.2).
Ernest Redekop Essay Prize Winner & Honourable Mentions
- WINNER: Simon Rolston for “Shame and the Ex-Convict: The New Jim Crow, African American Literature, and Edward P. Jones’s “Old Boys, Old Girls””(CRAS 48.1).
- HONOURABLE MENTIONS: Jennifer Andrews for “Escape to Canada: Richard Ford’s Fugitive Novel” (CRAS 48.1); Stephen Carter for “‘I Am Resisting Narrative Here’: The Vietnam War, Postmodernism, and the Ends of American Power in Joan Didion’s Democracy” (CRAS 48.3); and Mark Niemeyer for “Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie and the Ambiguous Afterlife of the History of the Acadians” (CRAS 48.2).
2017 Winners
Robert K. Martin Book Prize Winner & Honourable Mentions
- WINNER: Dr. Albert Sergio Laguna, for Diversión: Play and Popular Culture in Cuban America (New York University Press, 2017).
Ernest Redekop Essay Prize Winner & Honourable Mentions
- WINNER: Beverly Tomek, “The Economization of Freedom: Abolitionists versus Merchants in the Culture War that Destroyed Pennsylvania Hall”(CRAS 47.2).
- HONOURABLE MENTIONS: Jean Lee Cole, “Laughing Sam and Krazy Kats: The Black Comic Sensibility” (CRAS 47.3); and Jenny Kerber for “Border Insecurity: Reading Transnational Environments in Jim Lynch’s Border Songs” (CRAS 47.1).
2016 Winners
Robert K. Martin Book Prize Winner & Honourable Mentions
- WINNER: Andrea Stone for Black Well-Being: Health and Selfhood in Antebellum Black Literature (University Press of Florida, 2016).
- HONOURABLE MENTIONS: Maureen Tuthill (Westminster College), for Health and Sickness in the Early American Novel: Social Affection and Eighteenth-Century Medicine(Palgrave, 2016); and Bryce Traister (UBC Okanagan) for Female Piety and the Invention of American Puritanism (Ohio State UP, 2016).
Ernest Redekop Essay Prize Winner & Honourable Mentions
- WINNER: David J. Drysdale, “Ridge’s Joaquín Murieta: Banditry, Counterinsurgency, and Colonial Power after Guadalupe-Hidalgo” (CRAS 46.1).
- HONOURABLE MENTIONS: Justin Rogers-Cooper, “Downfall of the Republic! The 1877 General Strike and the Fictions of Red Scare” (CRAS 46.3); and Jenny Heijun Wills, “Paradoxical Essentialism: Reading Race and Origins in Jane Jeong Trenka’s Asian Adoption Memoirs” (CRAS 46.2).
2015 Winners
Robert K. Martin Book Prize Winner
- WINNER: Finis Dunaway for Seeing Green: The Use and Abuse of American Environmental Images(U of Chicago P 2015).
- HONOURABLE MENTION: Jason Haslam for Gender, Race, and American Science Fiction (Routledge 2015).
Ernest Redekop Essay Prize Winner
- WINNER: Patrick Manning, for “Archiving the Rust Belt: Investigating Rust Belt Narratives of American Exceptionalism through Buffalo’s Downtown Department Store” (CRAS 45.3).
- HONOURABLE MENTION: Robert K. Martin and Leland Person, for ‘“But Suppose I Did Want a Boy?” Homosexual Economies in Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man” (CRAS 45.1).
2014 Winners
Robert K. Martin Book Prize Winner
- WINNER: Mary Chapman for Making Noise, Making News: Suffrage Print Culture and U.S. Modernism (Oxford UP 2014).
Ernest Redekop Essay Prize Winner
- WINNER: Paul Lawrie for “Mortality as the Life Story of a People: Frederick L. Hoffman and Actuarial Narratives of African American Extinction” (CRAS 43.3).
2013 Winners
Robert K. Martin Book Prize Winner
- WINNER: Christine Bold for The Frontier Club: Popular Westerns and Cultural Power, 1880—1924 (Oxford UP, 2013).
Ernest Redekop Essay Prize Winner
- WINNER: Brian Foster for “I Love Working for Uncle Sam, Lets me Know Just Who I Am: Culture, the Human Terrain System, and the Inquiry of World War” (CRAS 44.2)
- HONOURABLE MENTIONS: Monica Manolescu for “Cartography and Renewal in Rebecca Solnit’s Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas” (CRAS 44.2); and Ira Wells for “No Hostages through These Doors: Thomas Bartlett Whitaker’s “Hell’s Kitchen” and the Politics of PEN” (CRAS 44.3).
2012 Winners
Robert K. Martin Book Prize Winner
- WINNER: Jeannine DeLombard for In the Shadow of the Gallows: Race, Crime, and American Civic Identity (U of Pennsylvania P, 2011).
Ernest Redekop Essay Prize Winner
- WINNER: Susan Knabe for “Suffer the Children: National Crisis, Collective Affectivity, and the Sexualized Child”
- HONOURABLE MENTIONS: Ross Bullen for “Blood Money: Gresham’s Law, Property, and Race in Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses“ (CRAS 42.2); and Stuart J. Murray for “Rhetorical Insurgents: Biopolitics and the Insurrectionary Rhetoric of McLuhan’s Cool Media” (CRAS 42.2)
2011 Winners
Robert K. Martin Book Prize Co-Winners
- WINNERS: Tess Chakkalakal for Novel Bondage: Slavery, Marriage, and Freedom in Nineteenth Century America (U of Illinois P, 2011); and Stephen Schryer for Fantasies of the New Class: Ideologies of Professionalism in Post-World War II American Fiction (Columbia UP, 2011).
Ernest Redekop Essay Prize Winner
- WINNER: Sara Humphreys for “The Mass Marketing of the Colonial Captive Hannah Duston” (CRAS 40.2).
- HONOURABLE MENTION:Jan Olesen for “The Persistence of Myth: Written Authority in the Wake of New World Discovery”(CRAS 40.2).
2010 Winners
Robert K. Martin Book Prize Winner
- WINNER: Giorgio Bertellini for Italy in Early American Cinema: Race, Language, and the Picturesque (Indiana UP).
Ernest Redekop Essay Prize Winner
- WINNER: Brian Norman for “Clarifying Blackness in Anglo-Native Fictions: Tom Spanbauer’s Cross-Ethnic Borrowings” (CRAS 40.2).
- HONOURABLE MENTIONS: Kit Dobson for “Derelicte and the Oppressed: Zoolander, Hollywood, and Representing Activism” (CRAS 40.3); and Adam Beardsworth for “Learning to Love the Bomb: Robert Lowell’s Pathological Poetics” (CRAS 40.1).