About the Prize
In 2001, SASA’s Executive Committee established Critoph Award for the best graduate student paper presented at SASA’s biennial conference. Named in memory of Professor Gerald “Jerry” Critoph of Stetson University, a former long-term member of SASA’s Executive Committee, this award includes a certificate and a check for $250, as well as recognition at the next SASA meeting and, of course, on the recipient’s C.V.
The deadline for the Critioph Prize is coordinated with SASA's biennial conference. For more details, see SASA's website.
Past Recipients
2022: MICKELL CARTER, Auburn University, “Stylin’ Black Power”
Honorable Mention: D. Caleb Smith, University of Tulane University, “Race, Law, Aluminum: Harris A. Parson and Twenty Years of Workplace Struggle”
2019: JESSICA COHEN, Florida State University, “A House is Not a Home: Whiteness and the Politics of Space in Toni Morrison’s A Mercy”
Honorable Mention: Emily Masghati, University of Chicago, for “Cohorts that Win: Brown vs. Board of Education and the Legacy of the Rosenwald Fellows”
2017: JAN HUBENTHAL, College of William & Mary, “Reimaginings, Circulations, Displacements: AIDS in Uganda and the Exporting of American Homophobia”
Honorable Mention: Tyler N. Taylor, College of William & Mary, “American Empire in Italy: Italian Reactions to Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show”
2015: JOSEPH THOMPSON, University of Virginia, Department of History, “Nat ‘King’ Cole’s Civil War: How the Intimate Sounds of Pop Music Ignited Alabama’s Racial Tensions in the 1950s”
Honorable Mention: Katie Schank, George Washington University, Department of American Studies, “From Infamous to Famous: (Re)Constructing Atlanta’ Public Housing Through Rap and Hip Hop”
2013: DAEGAN MILLER, Cornell University, for “Re-Placing John Brown: Utopian Agrarianism and Black Pioneers in New York State’s Adirondack Mountains, 1846-1859″
Honorable Mentions: Amy King, University of Mississippi, “Rape between Women as Social Policing in Valerie Martin’s Property“; Regin Mann, University of California, Riverside, “Behind the Scenes of Emancipation: Race, Ritual, and the Reconstitution of the Antebellum Order”
2011: CATHERINE MICHNA, Boston College, ‘Running and Jumping to Join the Parade’: Second-Line Literatures in Post-Katrina New Orleans”
Honorable Mentions: Katie Burnett, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, “Commerce, Regionalism and George Washington Cable’s New Orleans”; Frank Cha, College of William and Mary, “Blacks, Whites, and Us: Chinese Immigrant Women, Jim Crow, and the Search for Belonging in John Jung’s Southern Fried Rice: Life in a Chinese Laundry in the Deep South”
2009: KATHLEEN BRIAN, George Washington University, “‘The Sound of Authority’: Aural Observation and Hallucinatory Culture at the Government Hospital for the Insane, 1895-1905”
Honorable Mentions: Sarah Carter, Harvard University; Tara McLellan, University of Mississippi
2007: VICTOR HOBSON, University of East Anglia (and recently a British Research Council Fellow at the Library of Congress’s John W. Kluge Center), “Re-Engaging Blues Narratives.”
Honorable Mention: Suzanne Lee, Saint Louis University
2005: MICHELLE LADD, California State University, Los Angeles, “Access on a Barrier (Island): Race, Class, and Tobacco in The Awakening”
Second Prize: Christopher Lawton, University of Georgia
Honorable Mentions: Andrew Marcum, University of Alabama; Stefanie Herron, University of Delaware
2003: ANDREW BECK GRACE, University of Wyoming, “Matthew Shepard and Billy Jack Gaither: The Politics of Victimhood”
Honorable Mention: Robert Powell, Florida State University
2001: AMY WOOD, Emory University, Graduate Institute for the Liberal Arts, “Witnessing Death: Public Hangings and Moving Pictures in the American South”