Announcements

Commonplace is now accepting submissions of approximately 2000 words that analyze vast early America before 1900.

They are seeking a diverse range of articles on material and visual culture, critical reviews of books, films, and digital humanities projects, poetic research and fiction, pedagogy, and the historian’s craft. They are especially interested in deep reads of individual objects, images, or documents (including in the collection of the American Antiquarian Society).

Modern Language Association Forum on Early American Literature 

2019 Richard Beale Davis Prize 

Award Recipients: Reed Gochberg and Ana Schwartz

Prize Committee: Jeffrey Glover, Kirsten Silva Gruesz, and Martha Elena Rojas

Lindsay DiCuirci, Associate Professor of English at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), has been selected to receive the 2020 Early American Literature Book Prize, which is awarded in even calendar years to a first monograph published in the prior two years, and in odd years to a second or subsequent book. DiCuirci’s Colonial Revivals: The Nineteenth-Century Lives of Early American Books was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2019.

Congratulations to Ajay Kumar Batra (University of Pennsylvania) on winning the American Literature Society's 1921 Prize in American Literature for his essay in Early American Literature 55.2, "Reading with Conviction: Abraham Johnstone and the Poetics of the Dead End.” The essay appeared in a special issue of the journal, “Beyond Recovery,” guest edited by professors Lauren Coats and Steffi Dippold.

"Reading with Convicton" will be provided open-access on Project MUSE through February. Check it out!

Early American Literature seeks conference reviewers for the following conferences. Conference reviews cover panels relevant to EAL’s readership, encompassing the overall range of the event and addressing key themes of particular interest to the reviewer. Conference reviews are generally 1500-2000 words in length, but they can be longer or shorter depending on the scope of the event.

Scholars specializing in early American literature have a duty to the public to raise awareness of how past events and beliefs impact our current lives-- especially in the midst of a global pandemic and nationwide protests against systemic racism. This is why EAL has decided to provide Christopher Trigg’s essay, “The Racial Politics of Resurrection in the 18th-Century Atlantic World” open-access on our website.

Lisa Brooks, Professor of English and American Studies at Amherst College, has been selected to receive the 2019 Early American Literature Book Prize, which is awarded in even calendar years to a first monograph published in the prior two years, and in odd years to a second or subsequent book. Brooks’s Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War was published by Yale University Press in 2018.

The deadline for our Early American Literature's 2019 Book Prize has been extended, moved from February 1 to March 1, 2019.

Nominations for second or later books will be accepted through that date. For more information regarding the nomination process, please see our original announcement on the EAL website.

The editors of Early American Literature are pleased to announce the fifth annual Early American Literature Book Prize, which will be given for an author’s second or subsequent academic monograph about American literature in the colonial period through the early republic (roughly 1830). The prize is offered in collaboration with the University of North Carolina Press, the Society of Early Americanists, and the MLA’s Forum on American Literature to 1800.

Monographs published in 2017 or 2018 are eligible for the 2019 prize, which carries a cash award of $2000.

The decade since the publication of Catherine Gallagher’s landmark essay “The Rise of Fictionality” (2006) has witnessed an increasing concern with overturning well-established theories of the rise of the novel and the development of literary realism through a re-examination of the axiomatic values underpinning contemporary attitudes toward the concept of “fiction.”

The recognition that archives are partial, filled with lacunae that demand scholarly attention, has fueled research engaging the epistemological, cultural, and political forces of early American materials and repositories. While powerful, positivist recovery work—efforts to fill gaps and hear silenced voices— has theoretically and materially expanded early American studies, the archive remains yet and always incomplete.