James Russell Lowell Prize Winners
2022
- Matt Cohen, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, for The Silence of the Miskito Prince: How Cultural Dialogue Was Colonized (Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2022)
- Honorable mention: Lee Edelman, Tufts University, for Bad Education: Why Queer Theory Teaches Us Nothing (Duke Univ. Press, 2022)
- Honorable mention: Régine Michelle Jean-Charles, Northeastern University, for Looking for Other Worlds: Black Feminism and Haitian Fiction (Univ. of Virginia Press, 2022)
2021
- Kevin Quashie, Brown University, for Black Aliveness; or, a Poetics of Being (Duke Univ. Press, 2021)
- Honorable mention: Erica R. Edwards, Yale University, for The Other Side of Terror: Black Women and the Culture of US Empire (New York Univ. Press, 2021)
- Honorable mention: Jini Kim Watson, New York University, for Cold War Reckonings: Authoritarianism and the Genres of Decolonization (Fordham Univ. Press, 2021)
2020
- Peter Boxall, University of Sussex, for The Prosthetic Imagination: A History of the Novel as Artificial Life (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2020)
2019
- Lynn Festa, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, for Fiction without Humanity: Person, Animal, Thing in Early Enlightenment Literature and Culture (Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2019)
- Honorable mention: Yogita Goyal, University of California, Los Angeles, for Runaway Genres: The Global Afterlives of Slavery (New York Univ. Press, 2019)
2018
- Jonathan P. Eburne, Pennsylvania State University, for Outsider Theory: Intellectual Histories of Unorthodox Ideas (Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2018)
- Honorable mention: Sara Blair, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, for How the Other Half Looks: The Lower East Side and the Afterlives of Images (Princeton Univ. Press, 2018)
2017
- Deborah L. Nelson, University of Chicago, for Tough Enough: Arbus, Arendt, Didion, McCarthy, Sontag, Weil (Univ. of Chicago Press, 2017)
- Honorable mention: Susan Scott Parrish, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, for The Flood Year 1927: A Cultural History (Princeton Univ. Press, 2017)
2016
- Branka Arsić, Columbia University, for Bird Relics: Grief and Vitalism in Thoreau (Harvard Univ. Press, 2016)
2015
- Caroline Levine, Cornell University, for Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Princeton Univ. Press, 2015)
2014
- Anna Brickhouse, University of Virginia, for The Unsettlement of America: Translation, Interpretation, and the Story of Don Luis de Velasco, 1560–1945 (Oxford Univ. Press, 2014)
- Honorable mention: Ramie Targoff, Brandeis University, for Posthumous Love: Eros and the Afterlife in Renaissance England (Univ. of Chicago Press, 2014)
2013
- David Rosen, Trinity College, and Aaron Santesso, Georgia Institute of Technology, for The Watchman in Pieces: Surveillance, Literature, and Liberal Personhood (Yale Univ. Press, 2013)
- Honorable mention: Michael North, University of California, Los Angeles, for Novelty: A History of the New (Univ. of Chicago Press, 2013)
2012
- Sianne Ngai, Stanford University, for Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (Harvard Univ. Press, 2012)
- Honorable mention: Leah Price, Harvard University, for How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (Princeton Univ. Press, 2012)
2011
- Simon Gikandi, Princeton University, for Slavery and the Culture of Taste (Princeton Univ. Press, 2011)
- Stephen Greenblatt, Harvard University, for The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (W. W. Norton, 2011)
- Honorable mention: Andrew F. Jones, University of California, Berkeley, for Developmental Fairy Tales: Evolutionary Thinking and Modern Chinese Culture (Harvard Univ. Press, 2011)
2010
- Phillip H. Round, University of Iowa, for Removable Type: Histories of the Book in Indian Country, 1663–1880 (Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2010)
2009
- Laura Dassow Walls, University of South Carolina, for The Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America (Univ. of Chicago Press, 2009)
- Honorable mention: Joseph Litvak, Tufts University, for The Un-Americans: Jews, the Blacklist, and Stoolpigeon Culture (Duke Univ. Press, 2009)
2008
- Isobel Armstrong, University of London, for Victorian Glassworlds: Glass Culture and the Imagination 1830–1880 (Oxford Univ. Press, 2008)
2007
- Laura Marcus, University of Edinburgh, for The Tenth Muse: Writing about Cinema in the Modernist Period (Oxford Univ. Press, 2007)
2006
- Martin Puchner, Columbia University, for Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestos, and the Avant-Gardes (Princeton Univ. Press, 2006)
- Honorable mention: Wai Chee Dimock, Yale University, for Through Other Continents: American Literature across Deep Time (Princeton Univ. Press, 2006)
- Honorable mention: Cynthia Wall, University of Virginia, for The Prose of Things: Transformations of Description in the Eighteenth Century (Univ. of Chicago Press, 2006)
2005
- Paula R. Backscheider, Auburn University, for Eighteenth-Century Women Poets and Their Poetry: Inventing Agency, Inventing Genre (Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2005)
- W. J. T. Mitchell, University of Chicago, for What Do Pictures Want?: The Lives and Loves of Images (Univ. of Chicago Press, 2005)
2004
- Diana Fuss, Princeton University, for The Sense of an Interior: Four Writers and the Rooms That Shaped Them (Routledge, 2004)
- Honorable mention: Alan Liu, University of California, Santa Barbara, for The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information (Univ. of Chicago Press, 2004)
2003
- Giancarlo Maiorino, Indiana University, Bloomington, for At the Margins of the Renaissance: Lazarillo de Tormes and the Picaresque Art of Survival (Penn State Univ. Press, 2003)
- Honorable mention: Brent Hayes Edwards, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, for The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Harvard Univ. Press, 2003)
- Honorable mention: Robert Pogue Harrison, Stanford University, for The Dominion of the Dead (Univ. of Chicago Press, 2003)
2002
- María Antonia Garcés, Cornell University, for Cervantes in Algiers: A Captive’s Tale (Vanderbilt Univ. Press, 2002)
- Honorable mention: Susan Stewart, University of Pennsylvania, for Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (Univ. of Chicago Press, 2002)
- Honorable mention: Wendy L. Wall, Northwestern University, for Staging Domesticity: Household Work and English Identity in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2002)
2001
- Jerome McGann, University of Virginia, for Radiant Textuality: Literature after the World Wide Web (Palgrave, 2001)
- Honorable mention: Eric L. Santner, University of Chicago, for On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life: Reflections on Freud and Rosenzweig (Univ. of Chicago Press, 2001)
2000
- Ann Rosalind Jones, Smith College, and Peter Stallybrass, University of Pennsylvania, for Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000)
1999
- Mary Baine Campbell, Brandeis University, for Wonder and Science: Imagining Worlds in Early Modern Europe (Cornell Univ. Press, 1999)
1998
- Gauri Viswanathan, Columbia University, for Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity, and Belief (Princeton Univ. Press, 1998)
- Honorable mention: Phyllis Blum Cole, Penn State University, Delaware County, for Mary Moody Emerson and the Origins of Transcendentalism: A Family History (Oxford Univ. Press, 1998)
1997
- David Wallace, University of Pennsylvania, for Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy (Stanford Univ. Press, 1997)
- Honorable mention: Joan DeJean, University of Pennsylvania, for Ancients against Moderns: Culture Wars and the Making of a Fin de Siècle (Univ. of Chicago Press, 1997)
- Honorable mention: Geoffrey H. Hartman, Yale University and George Washington University, for The Fateful Question of Culture (Columbia Univ. Press, 1997)
1996
- Joseph Roach, Yale University, for Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (Columbia Univ. Press, 1996)
- Honorable mention: Wai Chee Dimock, Yale University, for Residues of Justice: Literature, Law, Philosophy (Univ. of California Press, 1996)
1995
- Rey Chow, University of California, Irvine, for Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and Contemporary Chinese Cinema (Columbia Univ. Press, 1995)
- Honorable mention: John Felstiner, Stanford University, for Paul Celan (Yale Univ. Press, 1995)
- Honorable mention: Claudia L. Johnson, Princeton University, for Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender, and Sentimentality in the 1790s—Wollstonecraft, Radcliffe, Burney, Austen (Univ. of Chicago Press, 1995)
1994
- Catherine Gallagher, University of California, Berkeley, for Nobody's Story: Women Writers in the Marketplace (Univ. of California Press, 1994)
1993
- Eric J. Sundquist, University of California, Los Angeles, for To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature (Harvard Univ. Press, 1993)
1992
- Richard Helgerson, University of California, Santa Barbara, for Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Univ. of Chicago Press, 1992)
- Honorable mention: Kwame Anthony Appiah, Harvard University, for In My Father's House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (Oxford Univ. Press, 1992)
- Honorable mention: Mary Louise Pratt, Stanford University, for Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (Routledge, 1992)
1991
- Sacvan Bercovitch, Harvard University, for The Office of The Scarlet Letter (Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1991)
1990
- Fredric Jameson, Duke University, for Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Duke Univ. Press, 1990)
- Honorable mention: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Duke University, for Epistemology of the Closet (Univ. of California Press, 1990)
1989
- Denis Hollier, Yale University, with R. Howard Bloch, Peter Brooks, Joan DeJean, Barbara Johnson, Philip Lewis, Nancy Miller, François Rigolot, and Nancy J. Vickers, editors, for A New History of French Literature (Harvard Univ. Press, 1989)
- Honorable mention: Charles Bernheimer, University of Pennsylvania, for Figures of Ill Repute: Representing Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century France (Harvard Univ. Press, 1989)
- Honorable mention: Ronald Paulson, Johns Hopkins University, for Breaking and Remaking: Aesthetic Practice in England, 1700–1820 (Rutgers Univ. Press, 1989)
1988
- Stephen Greenblatt, University of California, Berkeley, for Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Univ. of California Press, 1988)
1987
- Michael McKeon, Rutgers University, for The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740 (Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1987)
1986
- Joseph Frank, Institute for Advanced Studies and Stanford University, for Dostoevsky: The Stir of Liberation, 1860–1865 (Princeton Univ. Press, 1986)
1985
- Joel Fineman, University of California, Berkeley, for Shakespeare's Perjured Eye: The Invention of Poetic Subjectivity in the Sonnets (Univ. of California Press, 1985)
- Honorable mention: Jane Gallop, Rice University, for Reading Lacan (Cornell Univ. Press, 1985)
1984
- V. A. Kolve, University of Virginia, for Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative: The First Five Canterbury Tales (Stanford Univ. Press, 1984)
1983
- Stephen G. Nichols, Jr., University of Pennsylvania, for Romanesque Signs: Early Medieval Narrative and Iconography (Yale Univ. Press, 1983)
1982
- Thomas M. Greene, Yale University, for The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (Yale Univ. Press, 1982)
- Honorable mention: Raymond E. Fitch, Ohio University, for The Poison Sky: Myth and Apocalypse in Ruskin (Ohio Univ. Press, 1982)
1981
- Gay Wilson Allen, New York University, for Waldo Emerson: A Biography (Viking, 1981)
1980
- Benjamin Bennett, University of Virginia, for Modern Drama and German Classicism (Cornell Univ. Press, 1980)
1979
- Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, Brown University, for Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric (Princeton Univ. Press, 1979)
1978
- Andrew Welsh, Rutgers University, for Roots of Lyric: Primitive Poetry and Modern Poetics (Princeton Univ. Press, 1978)
- Honorable mention: Edwin M. Eigner, University of California, Riverside, for The Metaphysical Novel in England and America (Univ. of California Press, 1978)
1977
- Stephen Booth, University of California, Berkeley, for Shakespeare's Sonnets (Yale Univ. Press, 1977)
1976
- Joseph Frank, Princeton University, for Dostoevsky: The Seeds of Revolt, 1821–1849 (Princeton Univ. Press, 1976)
1975
- Jonathan Culler, Oxford University, for Structuralist Poetics (Cornell Univ. Press, 1975)
1974
- Josephine Miles, University of California, Berkeley, for Poetry and Change (Univ. of California Press, 1974)
1973
- Leslie A. Marchand, Rutgers University, for Byron's Letters and Journals (Harvard Univ. Press, 1973)
- Honorable mention: Stephen J. Greenblatt, University of California, Berkeley, for Sir Walter Raleigh: The Renaissance Man and His Roles (Yale Univ. Press, 1973)
1972
- Theodore J. Ziolkowski, Princeton University, for Fictional Transfigurations of Jesus (Princeton Univ. Press, 1972)
- Honorable mention: Jonathan Saville, University of California, San Diego, for The Medieval Erotic Alba: Structure as Meaning (Columbia Univ. Press, 1972)
1971
- Meyer H. Abrams, Cornell University, for Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (Norton, 1971)
1970
- Bruce A. Rosenberg, Pennsylvania State University, for The Art of the American Folk Preacher (Oxford Univ. Press, 1970)
- Honorable mention: Don Cameron Allen, Johns Hopkins University, for Mysteriously Meant: The Rediscovery of Pagan Symbolism and Allegorical Interpretation in the Renaissance (Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1970)
- Honorable mention: Lawrence E. Harvey, Dartmouth College, for Samuel Beckett, Poet and Critic (Princeton Univ. Press, 1970)
1969
- Helen Vendler, Boston University, for On Extended Wings: Wallace Stevens' Longer Poems (Harvard Univ. Press, 1969)
- Honorable mention: Theodore J. Ziolkowski, Princeton University, for Dimensions of the Modern Novel (Princeton Univ. Press, 1969)