Awards

American Studies Division

Interest Group Awards

Listed here are awards given by the Interest Group to its members. Interests Groups are smaller communities within NCA's large membership that provide a range of resources including networking opportunities, Annual Convention programming, leadership opportunities, awards, and specialized information dissemination channels, among others.

Read more about this Interest Group.


Outstanding Book Award

Year Award Winner
2023 Leland G. Spencer, "Rape, Agency, and Carceral Solutions: From Criminal Justice to Social Justice"
2018 Kristen Hoerl, "The Bad Sixties: Hollywood Memories of the Counterculture, Antiwar, and Black Power Movements"

Outstanding Article Award

Year Award Winner
2023 Meredith Neville-Shepard, "Better Never Means Better for Everyone: White Feminist Necropolitics and Hulu's The Handmaid's Tale," published in Quarterly Journal of Speech in 2022
2018 Ashley Noel Mack & Bryan J. McCann "'Strictly an act of street violence': intimate publicity and affective divestment in the New Orleans Mother's Day shooting."
2016 Elisabeth H. Kinsley

Top Paper Award

Year Award Winner
2016 Andrea N. Wheeler
2016 William Scott Sanders, Selene G. Phillips, and Cecelia Hunt
2016 Rachel Elizabeth Presley
2015 Tiara R. Na’puti, “Militarization and Resistance from Guahan (Guam): Protecting and Defending Against America”
2015 Thomas A. Salek, “Money Doesn’t Talk, It Swears: Parody, Excess and Strategic Ambiguity in Martin Scorsese’s ‘The Wolf of Wall Street’”
2015 Dominic Manthy, “Rhetoric of Blood: Framing Protest in the Tuscarora Counter-Movement”
2015 Bridget Sutherland, “They Come Here to Hunt: The Law, Space and Gender Violence in Indian Country”
2013 David Worthington “Narratives of “Vitim,” “Perpetrator,” and “Liberator” at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum”
2013 Jason Edward Black “’Don’t Worry ‘Bout Losing your Accent; A Southern Man Tells Better Jokes’: Generationalism in the Southern-Based Lyrics of the Drive-By Truckers”
2013 Brook Irving “The Land that Time Forgot: Symbolizing the Stopped Clock in Industrial Ruin”

Top Student Paper Award

Year Award Winner
2013 Allison Prasch

Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award

Year Award Winner
2023 Kristina M. Lee, "'One Nation Under God?' A Call for Secular Rhetorical Criticism"
2018 Jamie L. Downing, “'Whatever We may be We may be, but Jews are What We are': Jewish Rhetoric and the Construction of Great Plains and Upper Midwestern Jewish Communities.”

Outstanding Master's Thesis Award

Year Award Winner
2023 TBD