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

CAAS is now accepting nominations for the Robert K. Martin prize for best book published in the 2018 calendar year. The deadline for submissions is April 19, 2019. All submissions should be sent directly to:

Jennifer Harris (2018 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.

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

• Mary Chapman for Making Noise, Making News: Suffrage Print Culture and U.S. Modernism (Oxford UP 2014)

Ernest Redekop Essay Prize Winner

• Paul Lawrie, for “Mortality as the Life Story of a People: Frederick L. Hoffman and Actuarial Narratives of African American Extinction”

2013 Winners

Robert K. Martin Book Prize 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”
• HONOURABLE MENTIONS
  • Monica Manolescu for “Cartography and Renewal in Rebeca Solnit’s Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas”
  • Ira Wells for “No Hostages through These Doors: Thomas Bartlett Whitaker’s “Hell’s Kitchen” and the Politics of PEN”

2012 Winners

Robert K. Martin Book Prize 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“
  • Stuart J. Murray, for “Rhetorical Insurgents: Biopolitics and the Insurrectionary Rhetoric of McLuhan’s Cool Media”

2011 Winners

Robert K. Martin Book Prize Co-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

• Sara Humphreys’ “The Mass Marketing of the Colonial Captive Hannah Duston” (issue 40.2)
• Honourable Mention: Jan Olesen’s “The Persistence of Myth: Written Authority in the Wake of New World Discovery”(issue 40.2)

2010 Winners

Robert K. Martin Book Prize Winner

• Giorgio Bertellini, Italy in Early American Cinema: Race, Language, and the Picturesque (Indiana UP)

Ernest Redekop Essay Prize Winner

• Brian Norman, “Clarifying Blackness in Anglo-Native Fictions: Tom Spanbauer’s Cross-Ethnic Borrowings”
• Honourable Mention: Kit Dobson, “Derelicte and the Oppressed: Zoolander, Hollywood, and Representing Activism”
• Honourable Mention Adam Beardsworth, “Learning to Love the Bomb: Robert Lowell’s Pathological Poetics”