Greenspan–Rose Book History Essay Prize

Book History‘s annual Greenspan–Rose Prize is given to the best article in that year’s volume whose author was a graduate student at the time the essay was first submitted. Winners receive US$500 and recognition at SHARP’s Annual General Meeting.

Formerly the “Graduate Student Essay Prize,” the award was renamed as of the 25th anniversary volume to honor Book History founding editors Ezra Greenspan and Jonathan Rose. Both eminent book historians in their own right, in their role as journal editors Greenspan and Rose gave extraordinary attention to mentoring young scholars and graduate students. The current editors of Book History are equally devoted to fostering the careers of new and emerging members of the profession.

The 2022 Essay Prize Winner

The winner of the 2022 prize is Jennifer Manoukian, for her article “Literary Translation and the Expansion of the Ottoman Armenian Reading Public, 1853–1884,” published in volume 25, issue 1.

Manoukian is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a literary translator from Western Armenian. She has an MA in Armenian education from Columbia University (2014) and has published both studies and translations of several important Armenian writers. Her research interests include Ottoman Armenian social, cultural and intellectual history, linguistic purism, and the nexus between translation studies and book history.

Previous awardees

2021

Fan Wang, “How Late Imperial Chinese Literati Read Their Books: Inscribing, Collating, Excerpting”

2020

Mary Catherine Kinniburgh, “The Postwar American Poet’s Library: An Archival Consideration with Charles Olson and the Maud/Olson Library”

2019

Amy Sopcak-Joseph, “Reconstructing and Gendering the Distribution Networks of Godey’s Lady’s Book in the Nineteenth Century”

2018

Anna Wager, “Photographs, Pens, and Print: William Morris and the Technologies of Typography”

2017

Kathryn A. Schwartz, “Did Ottoman Sultans Ban Print?”

2016

Kristen Highland, “In the Bookstore: The Houses of Appleton and Book Cultures in Antebellum New York City” (additional material at Book History Unbound: “An Appleton Archive”)

2015

Elizabeth Della Zazzera, “Translating Revolutionary Time: French Republican Almanacs in the United States”

2014

Albert A. Palacios, “Preventing ‘Heresy’: Censorship and Privilege in Mexican Publishing, 1590–1612”

2013

Brigitte Beck Pristed, “Glasnost Noire: The Soviet and Post-Soviet Publication and Reception of James Hadley Chase”

2012

Elizabeth le Roux, “Book History in the African World: The State of the Discipline”

2011

Eva Mroczek, “Thinking Digitally About the Dead Sea Scrolls: Book History Before and Beyond the Book”

2010

Spencer D. C. Keralis, “Pictures of Charlotte: The Illustrated Charlotte Temple and Her Readers”

2009

Elizabeth Yale, “With Slips and Scraps: How Early Modern Naturalists Invented the Archive”

2008

Joanne Filippone Overty, “The Cost of Doing Scribal Business: Prices of Manuscript Books in England, 1300-1483”

2007

Matt Miller, “Composing the First Leaves of Grass: How Whitman Used His Early Notebooks”

2006

Melissa Free, “Un-Erasing CrusoeFarther Adventures in the Nineteenth Century”

Special citation for a distinguished article by an undergraduate student awarded to Emily Oswald, “Imagining Race: Illustrating the Poems of Paul Lawrence Dunbar”

2005

Patricia May B. Jurilla, Florante at Laura and the History of the Filipino Book”

2004

Neil Safier, “‘. . . To Collect and Abridge . . . Without Changing Anything Essential’: Rewriting Incan History at the Parisian Jardin du Roi”

2003

Rebecca Rego Barry, “The Neo-Classics: (Re)Publishing the ‘Great Books’ in the United States in the 1990s”

2002

Matt Cohen, “Morton’s Maypole and the Indians: Publishing in Early New England”

2001

Eric Lupfer, “Before Nature Writing: Houghton, Mifflin and Company and the Invention of the Outdoor Book, 1880-1900”