Recent NEPCA Book Prize Winners

Each year NEPCA awards the Peter C. Rollins Prize, a cash prize for the best book on American or popular culture penned by a scholar who lives and/or works in New England or New York. The prize is given at the proceeding fall conference.)

Below is a list of recent winners:

Note: NEPCA awards this prize in the calendar year after its publication (which is indicated in parentheses).

1997:  Stephen Soitos , The Blues Detective: A Study of African American Detective Fiction (University of  Massachusetts Press)

1998: David Wagner, The New Temperance: The American Obsession with Sin and Vice (Westview Press)

1999: Daniel Horowitz, Betty Friedan and the Making of the Feminine Mystique: The American Left, the Cold War, and  Modern Feminism (University of Massachusetts Press)

2000: Robert G. Lee,  Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture (Viking)

2001:  Catherine Allgor,  Parlor Politics: In Which the Ladies of Washington Help Build a City and a Government (University Press of Virginia)

2002:  Joseph A. Conforti, Imagining New England: Explorations of Regional Identity from the Pilgrims to the Mid-Twentieth Century (University of North Carolina Press)

2003:  Stephen Prothero, American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

2004:  Steve Fraser, Every Man a Spectator: A History of Wall Street in American Life (HarperCollins)

2005:  Jane Lancaster, Making Time: Lillian Moller Gilbreth––A Life  Beyond “Cheaper by the Dozen” (Northeastern)

2006:  Naoko Shibusawa, America’s Geisha: Reimagining the Japanese Enemy (Harvard)

2007:   Elizabeth DeWolfe, The Murder of Mary Bean and Other Stories (Kent State)

2008:  William Chapman Sharpe, New York Nocturne: The City After Dark in Literature, Painting, and Photography (Princeton)

2009:    Kathleen Collins, Watching What We Eat: The Evolution of Television Cooking Shows (Continuum)

2010:    Robert Love, The Great Oom: The Improbable Birth of Yoga in America (Viking)

2011:     Daniel Cavicchi, Listening and Longing: Music Lovers in the Age of Barnum (Wesleyan)

2012:     Cynthia Falk, Barns of New York: Rural Architecture of the Empire State (Cornell)

2013:    Ann Axtmann,  Indians and Wannabes (University of Florida)

2014:   Thomas Stubblefield, 9/11 and the Visual Culture of Disaster (Indiana University Press)

2015:   Hilary Neroni, The Subject of Torture: Psychoanalysis and Biopolitics in Television and Film (Columbia University Press)

2016:   Doug Dibbern, Hollywood Riots: Violent Crowds and Progressive Politics in American Film (I. B. Tauris)

2017: Albert Laguna. Diversión: Play and Popular Culture in Cuban America. (NYU Press)

2018: Amy Werbel Lust on Trial: Censorship and the Rise of American Obscenity in the Age of Anthony Comstock. (Columbia University Press)

2019: Elizabeth Otto. Haunted Bauhaus: Occult Spirituality, Gender Fluidity, Queer Identities, and Radical Politics. (MIT Press)

2020:  Daniel Y Kim Intimacies of Conflict: Cultural Memory and the Korean War. (NYU Press)

2021: Joy Sanchez-Taylor. Diverse Futures: Science Fiction and Authors of Color (Ohio State University Press)