American Studies Division
article type:
Interest Group Awards
2025
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 |
|---|---|
| 2025 | No Award Given |
| 2024 | Allison M. Prasch, “The World is Our Stage: The Global Rhetorical Presidency and the Cold War” |
| 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 |
|---|---|
| 2025 | No Award Given |
| 2024 | Meredith Neville-Shepard and Ryan Neville-Shepard, “Outfitting the Conservative Civil Rights Movement: Rehearsed White Victimhood and the MAGA Hat” |
| 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 |
|---|---|
| 2025 | Max Dosser, “If It Ain’t Woke, Don’t Fix It: The Revanchism of Bad Object (Anti-) Fans” |
| 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 |
|---|---|
| 2025 | Allegro Wang, “Time-Space Compression: Drone Surveillance on the US-Mexico Border” |
| 2013 | Allison Prasch |
Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award
| Year | Award Winner |
|---|---|
| 2025 | No Award Given |
| 2024 | Ana Isabel Terminel Iberri, “Beyond Critical Communication Pedagogy: Pláticas with Latinx Youth” |
| 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 |
|---|---|
| 2025 | No Award Given |
| 2024, | Kyra Bowar, “There Is No Normal”: How Ms. Marvel Constitutes U.S. American Citizenship Between Comics and Screen |
| 2023 | TBD |