About the Yasuo Sakakibara Prize

The Yasuo Sakakibara Prize honors the best paper presented by an international scholar at the annual meeting of the American Studies Association. The winner receives $500 and recognition at 0ur annual meeting.

The prize honors Yasuo Sakakibara, Professor Emeritus of Economics and first chair of the Graduate School in American Studies at Doshisha University and a past president of the Japanese Association for American Studies.

Application Deadline: August 1, 2026

Eligibility Requirements

Any international scholar who has had their paper accepted to the upcoming ASA annual meeting is eligible to apply. Applicants must also be:

Any paper given at the meeting - either in-person or virtually - is eligible for consideration, provided that it does not exceed 12 pages. The paper should be a work-in-progress.

Submission Instructions

Please compile the following materials into a single PDF document:

  1. A cover page with author's name, institutional affiliation, paper title, and contact information, and
  2. The conference paper. Papers should be 10-12 pages in length (approximately 3,500 words), including citations and notes. Illustrations are not counted as part of the 10-12 page limit.

Submit Here by August 1st

Questions? Please contact asastaff@theasa.net.

Past Winners

  • 2025: Wigbertson Julian Isenia, "MARIKU! Queer, Trans, and Otherwise in the Afterlife of Empire"
  • 2024: Nazli Akhtari, "Fugitive Listening to Jina's Revolution's Archive"
  • 2023: Lucy El-Sherif, McMaster University,“’Dabke is Better than a Thousand Lectures About Islamophobia’: Palestine, Arab Mothering and the Research Imagination”
  • 2022: Kristin Moriah, Queen's University, "A Matter of Mastery: Blackness and Sound at the Edge of the Atlantic"
  • 2021: Kodai Abe, "Two Ground Zeros: The Transpacific Victimology of Hiroshima and 9/11"
  • 2020: No selection
  • 2019: Chenrui Zhao, Binghamton University, “Resistance from the ‘Unreal’: Trouble of the Neoliberal Racial Project in Chimamanda Adichie's Americanah”
  • 2018: Christine "Xine" Yao, University College London, United Kingdom, "(Un)Sympathetic Babo: Blackness, Science, and the Sentimental Politics of Recognition"
  • 2017: No selection
  • 2016: Chien-Ting Lin, National Central University, Taiwan, "Buddha Bless America: Militarized Medical Humanitarianism and Cold War Humanism"
  • 2015: Kirsty Robertson, University of Western Ontario, Canada, "Oil Futures/Petro-Fabrics"
  • 2014: Mary Chapman, University of British Columbia, "Playing in the Mediascape: A Pseudonymous Travelogue by Sui Sin Far/Edith Eaton"
  • 2013: Ethan Blue, University of Western Australia, "The Deportation Special: Mobile Carceral Space and the Emergence of Mass Deportation"
  • 2012: Leslie Paris, University of British Columbia, "'˜The Mess They Leave Behind': American Children and Environmental Activism, 1962-1980"
  • 2011: Ira Dworkin, The American University in Cairo (Egypt), "George Washington Williams, King Leopold II, and African American Emigration to the Congo"
  • 2010: Chris Lee, University of British Columbia, "New Criticism as Modernization"
  • 2009: Leslie Paris, University of British Columbia, "Happily Ever After: Reading Free to Be ... You and Me"
  • 2008: Chih-ming Wang, Academia Sinica, Taiwan, "How does America Mean in Chinese? Overseas Student Writing and Trans-Pacific American Studies"
  • 2007: No selection
  • 2006: Mary Chapman, University of British Columbia, Canada, "Sui Sin Far and the Discourses of the American and Chinese Suffrage Movements in the 1910's"
  • 2005: Finis Dunaway, Trent University, Canada, "Gas Masks, Pogo, and the Ecological Indian: Earth Day and the Visual Politics of American Environmentalism"
  • 2004: Lily Cho, University of Western Ontario, Canada, "Seeing through Smoke: Situating the Coolie within the Discourse of Freedom"
  • 2003: Min-Jung Kim, Ewha Woman's University, Seoul, Korea, "Nation, Immigration, and National Identity in Ronyoung Kim's Clay Walls"
  • 2002: Joanne M. Mancini, University of Sussex, United Kingdom, "The Country Age: Globalization and Modernity in an American Region"