SoFCB Essay Prize

Note: The 2026 application cycle has closed. Next year’s competition will open in winter/spring 2027.

Articles with a publication date of 2025 or 2026 are eligible for the 2027 prize. Articles submitted for the 2026 prize competition are not eligible for the 2027 competition. 

Articles may be sent as a PDF attachment to  sofcb_prizes@virginia.edu. In your message, please provide preferred contact details for the author(s) of the essay and include an abstract (no more than 250 words) outlining the essay’s original contribution to the study of texts, images, and artifacts as material objects. Limit one submission per author. 

Winner

• Macfarlane, Kirsten. “Written in the Stars?: Alphabets and Angels in Early Modern Europe.” Journal of the History of Ideas 86:3 (2025): 473-506.

Honorable Mention 

• Tamburro, Paul. “Reading All About It: Rethinking Orality in Classic Maya Scribal Imagery.” Ancient Mesoamerica 35 (2025).

Winner

• Carlos Alonso Nugent, “Drawing and Disrupting Borders in the Wake of the US–Mexico War.” Representations 166, no. 1 (2024): 86–117.

Honorable Mentions 

• Alpert-Abrams, Hannah, “An Unexpected Influence: Photostats in Special Collections Libraries.” The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 117, no. 3 (2023): 311–37. 

• Taylor, David Francis, “The Extraordinary Publication History of Addison’s Cato: Editions, Issues, Piracies.” The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 117, no. 4 (2023): 441–78. 

Winner 

• Whitney Trettien,“Substrate, Platform, Interface, Format.” Textual Cultures 16, no. 1 (2023). 

Honorable Mention 

• Emily Mokros, “Chinese Gazettes on the Margins of Book History: Movable Type, Wax Stereotypes, and Vernacular Techniques in Late Imperial China.” Book History 26, no. 1 (2023): 164-202. 

Winner 

• Cassidy Holahan,“Rummaging in the Dark: ECCO as Opaque Digital Archive.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 54, no. 4 (2021): 803–26. 

Honorable Mentions 

• Matthew D. C. Larsen, “The Real-and-Imagined Biography of a Gospel Manuscript.” Early Christianity 12, no. 1 (2021): 103–31. 

• William Stroebel, “Longhand Lines of Flight: Cataloging Displacement in a Karamanli Refugee’s Commonplace Book.” PMLA 136, no. 2 (2021): 190–212. 

Winner 

• David R. Como, “Printing the Levellers: Clandestine Print, Radical Propaganda, and the New Model Army,” The Library 22, no. 4 (December 2021): 441–86. 

Honorable Mentions 

• Alex W. Black, “‘A New Enterprise in Our History’: William Still, Conductor of The Underground Rail Road (1872),” American Literary History 32, no. 4 (Winter 2020): 668–90. 

• Nachiket Chanchani, “The Time Machines of Eighteenth-Century Mewar,” Archives of Asian Art 71, no. 2 (October 2001): 219–41. 

Winner 

• Elizabeth Neswald, “Things That Don’t Talk Much and Things That Feel: Developing a Material Culture Methodology for ‘Black Box’ Medical Devices,” Nuncius 35 (2020): 632–59. 

Honorable Mentions 

• Cat Lambert, “The Ancient Entomological Bookworm,” Arethusa 53, no. 1 (Winter 2020): 1–24. 

• Christopher N. Warren, Pierce Williams, Shruti Rijhwani, and Max G’Sell, “Damaged Type and Areopagitca’s Clandestine Printers,” Milton Studies 62, no. 1 (March 2020): 1–47. 

Winner 

• Michaël Roy, “The Slave Narrative Unbound,” in Brigitte Fielder and Jonathan Senchyne (eds), Against a Sharp White Background: Infrastructures of African American Print, Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 2019, p. 259–76. 

Honorable Mentions 

• Melissa Reynolds, “‘Here Is a Good Boke to Lerne’: Practical Books, the Coming of the Press, and the Search for Knowledge, ca. 1400–1560,” Journal of British Studies 58.2 (April 2019): 259–88. 

• Nora C. Benedict, “Books about Books and Books as Material Artifacts: Metabibliography in Jorge Luis Borges’s El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan (1941),” Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos 42, no. 3 (2018): 451–72.