Environmental Justice Caucus

The Environmental Justice Caucus awards the Annette Kolodny Prize. The prize, established in 2002, is awarded each year to the best environmentally-themed paper presented at the American Studies Association annual meeting. Awards are presented at the ASA annual meeting the following year.

Annette Kolodny Prize

Submissions are currently closed for 2026.

Submissions are judged by a panel of referees from the Environmental Justice Caucus. Only papers as they were presented at the previous year’s ASA annual meeting are considered.

Previous Winners

• 2025: Lisa Fink, “‘Invasive’ Species, Carceral Conservation, & Abolitionist Restoration”
• 2024: Heidi Amin-Hong, “Remapping Multispecies DMZs: Visual Poetics and Cold War Containment”
• 2023: Molly Henderson, “Denaturalizing the Family in Environmentalisms of the 1970-1990s” and Aanchal Saraf, “Remaking the Pacific Laboratory”
• 2022: Carlos Alonso Nugent, “Mescalero Apache Imagined Environments across the US-Mexico Borderlands” and Emma Shaw Crane “Lush Aftermath: Labor, Landscape, and War in the Suburb”
• 2021: Keva X. Bui, “Eugenic Ecologies: Operation Ranch Hand and the Reproductive Politics of Warfare, and Jessica Hurley, “How to Civilize an Ocean”
• 2019: Cleo Woelfle-Erskine, “With and for the Multitude: Ecology as Queer Acts”
• 2018: Jamie L. Jones, “The Great White Whale: White Supremacy and Natural Resource Extraction in early 20th-Century Whaling History”
• 2017: Bob Johnson, “Coal TV: The Hyperreal Mineral Frontier”
• 2016: John Levi Barnard, “Animal Capital and the Economy of Extinction”
• 2015: Kirsty Robertson, “Oil Futures/Petrotextiles”
• 2014: Jessica Cattelino, “The Cultural Politics of Invasive Species in the Florida Everglades”
• 2013: Natasha Zaretsky, “A Crime Against the Future: Fetal Injury, the Unborn, and the Radiation Scare of the 1950s”
• 2012: Megan Black, “Guardians of ‘Global’ Resources: Visualizing Energy and Empire in US Government-Sponsored Film, 1949-1956”
• 2011: Michael Lundblad, “Animality as Refuge: Terry Tempest Williams and the Biopolitics of Terminal Cancer”
• 2010: Stephanie LeMenager, “Aesthetics of Petroleum II: Petro-Melancholia and Gulf Coast Subsidence”
• 2009: Jessica Ramsey, “Floating Communities and Contested Belonging: The Flood Narratives of Hurricane Katrina and Richard Wright”
• 2009: Ivan Grabovac, “Nativism and Nationhood: Migratory Birds, Immigrants, and the Making of Ecological Citizens”
• 2008: Giovanna Di Chiro, “Polluted Politics? Confronting Toxic Discourse, Sex Panic, and Eco-Normativity”
• 2007: Erica Hannickel, An Agricultural Empire of Grapevines: Grape Culture in Antebellum America”
• 2006: Marina Moskowitz, “Quality Adapted to the Country: The Place of Horticulture in the Nineteenth Century”
• 2005: Finis Dunaway, “Gas Masks, Pogo, and the Ecological Indian: Earth Day and the Visual Politics of American Environmentalism”
• 2004: Phoebe Kropp, “Barefoot, Hungry, and Happy: The Bodily Experiences of Camping”
• 2003: C. Greig Crysler, “From Flesh to Fiberglass: ‘Cows on Parade’ in Chicago”
• 2002: Jennifer Mason, “Animals, Animality, and Nineteenth-Century American Literature: Or, Life in the Built Environment”