The Society for Textual Scholarship

The Greetham Prize

The Greetham Prize, formerly known as the Textual Cultures Prize, honors the author of the best article published in the Society of Textual Scholarship’s journal, Textual Cultures, during the two calendar years since the previous award. The prize carries an honorarium of US$250 and is selected by the editorial staff of the journal. The name was changed in 2021 to honor David C. Greetham, co-founder of the Society.

Past Winners of the Textual Cultures Prize

The 2023 Greetham Prize was awared to Maria Clotilde Camboni for her essay “Dante, Music and Lyric” in Textual Cultures 15.2, and Ronald Broude and Mary Cyr for their essay “The Emergence of Efficient Musical Texts during the Age of Reason” in Textual Cultures 15.2.

The 2021 Greetham Prize was awarded to two authors: Matt Cohen for “Time and the Bibliographer: A Meditation on the Spirit of Book Studies” and Kate Ozment for “Rationale for Feminist Bibliography,” both in Textual Cultures 13.1 (spring 2020).

The 2019 Textual Cultures Prize was awarded to Lyle Enright for “Building Devotion: History, Use, and Meaning in ‘John Buck’s Book’ (Newberry Library C 696.083).”

The 2017 Textual Cultures Prize was awarded to Dominque Zino for “The Invisible Hand of the Lyric: Emily Dickinson’s Hypermediated Manuscripts and the Debate over Genre.”

The 2015 Textual Cultures Prize was awarded to Margaret Maurer and Dennis Flynn, for “The Text of Goodf and John Donne’s Itinerary in April 1613.”

The 2013 Textual Cultures Prize (at that time called the “Executive Director’s Prize”) was awarded to Marta Werner for “Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan: Writing Otherwise” and “‘Reportless Places’: Facing the Modern Manuscript.”

The prize, for work published in Textual Cultures during calendar years 2008 and 2009, was awarded for the first time at the 2011 Conference to Michelangelo Zaccarello for his essay in the Spring 2009 issue, “Metodo stemmatico ed ecdotica volgare italiana: Brevi considerazioni su alcuni recenti contributi metodologici.” The 2011 prize committee consisted of H. Wayne Storey (chair), Edward Burns, Daniel O’Sullivan, and Alvaro Barbieri.

The Fredson Bowers Memorial Prize

The Society for Textual Scholarship awards the Fredson Bowers Memorial Prize for the most outstanding essay in textual scholarship exclusive of the winner of the Greetham Prize for that two-year cycle. Essays published in periodicals, critical books, and collections by diverse hands are eligible for the Bowers Prize. If part of a longer work, the significance of the essay must be independent of that context. The prize carries an honorarium of US$500.

Past Winners of the Bowers Memorial Prize

The 2023 Fredson Bowers Memorial Prize was awarded to Sonia Hazard for “The Politics of Media Format: Printing Poor Sarah During the Removal Crisis in Cherokee Nation” in Church History, 91:4 (December 2022). An Honorable Mention was given to Joseph J. Gwara for “Who Printed Huon? New Light on the Early Tudor Book Trade” in The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 116.3 (September 2022).

The 2021 Fredson Bowers Memorial Prize was awarded to Iona Hine for “Modeled on Zurich: A Fresh Study of Miles Coverdale’s 1535 Bible,” Reformation 25.1 (2020).

The 2019 Fredson Bowers Memorial Prize was awarded to Nancy K. Turner for “The Materiality of Medieval Parchment: A response to ‘The Animal Turn’,” Revista Hispánica Moderna 71.1 (June 2018). An Honorable Mention was given to Whitney Trettien for “Media, Materiality, and Time in the History of Reading: The Case of the Little Gidding Harmonies,” PMLA 133.5 (Oct. 2018).

The 2017 Fredson Bowers Memorial Prize was awarded to Paul Eggert, “The Reader-Oriented Scholarly Edition,” Digital Scholarship Humanities (2016) and Patrick Sahle, “What Is a Scholarly Digital Edition?” in Digital Scholarly Editing: Theories and Practices, eds. Matthew James Driscoll and Elana Pierazzo (Open Book Publishers, 2016); Honorable Mention, Tanya Clement, “Toward a Rationale of Audio-Text,” Digital Humanities Quarterly (2016).

The 2015 Fredson Bowers Memorial Prize was awarded to Whitney Trettien for “A Deep History of Electronic Textuality: The Case of Eng/ish Reprints Jhon Milton Aeropagitica,” Digital Humanities Quarterly (2013).

The 2013 Fredson Bowers Memorial Prize was awarded to Alan Galey for “The Enkindling Reciter: E-books in the Bibliographical Imagination,” Book History 15 (2012).

The 2011 Fredson Bowers Memorial Prize was awarded to Colbey Emmerson Reid, for her essay “Mina Loy’s Design Flaws,” which appeared in the 2007-08 issue of Florida Atlantic Comparative Studies (published in May 2009). The 2011 Fredson Bowers Memorial Prize Committee consisted of Meg Roland (chair), Nicholas Frankel, and Gabrielle Dean.

The 2009 Fredson Bowers Memorial Prize was awarded to Gabrielle Dean, for her essay “Grid Games: Gertrude Stein’s Diagrams and Detectives,” which appeared in the April 2008 issue of Modernism/Modernity. The 2009 Fredson Bowers Memorial Prize Committee consisted of H. Wayne Storey (chair), Marta Werner, and Randall McLeod.

The 2007 Fredson Bowers Memorial Prize was awarded to Lawrence Rainey for his essay, “With Automatic Hand: Writing the Waste Land,” from his book Revisiting the Waste Land (Yale, 2005). The 2007 Fredson Bowers Memorial Prize Committee consisted of Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, Chair, Marta L. Werner, and Randall McLeod.

The 2005 Fredson Bowers Memorial Prize was awarded to Randall McLeod for his essay “Gerard Hopkins and The Shapes of His Sonnets,” which appeared in Voice Text Hypertext: Emerging Practices in Textual Studies, edited by Raimonda Modiano, Leroy F. Searle, and Peter Shillingsburg (Seattle: U of Washington Press, 2004). The 2005 Fredson Bowers Memorial Prize Committee consisted of Nicholas Frankel, Chair, Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, and Marta L. Werner.

The 2003 Fredson Bowers Memorial Prize was awarded to Matthew G. Kirschenbaum for “Editing the Interface: Textual Studies and First Generation Electronic Objects,” TEXT 14 (2002): 15-51. The Prize Committee consisted of Marta L. Werner, Chair, Nicholas Frankel, and Trevor Howard-Hill.

The Richard J. Finneran Award

In the winter of 2005, the STS Executive Board voted to raise money to establish an enduring memorial to Richard J. Finneran in the form of the Finneran Award, a prize given in recognition of the best edition or book about editorial theory and/or practice published in the English language during the two calendar years since the previous award. The prize carries an honorarium of US$500.

Past Winners of the Finneran Memorial Award

The 2023 Richard J. Finneran Award went to Marta Werner for Writing in Time: Emily Dickinson’s Master Hours (Amherst College Press, 2021). Honorable mentions were given to Inessa Medzihbovskaya for Tolstoy as Philosopher: Essential Short Writings (1835-1910), an Anthology (Academic Studies Press, 2022); Whitney Trettien for Cut/Copy/Paste: Fragments from the History of Bookwork (University of Minnesota Press, 2021); and Dirk Van Hulle for Genetic Criticism: Tracing Creativity in Literature (Oxford University Press, 2022).

The 2021 Richard J. Finneran Award was presented to Nicole Gray for the variorum edition of Walt Whitman’s 1855 Leaves of Grass (Walt Whitman Archive, Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln).

Honorable mentions went to Jennifer Keith and Claudia Thomas Kairoff for The Works of Anne Finch, Countess of Winchelsea: Early Manuscript Books, vol. 1 (Cambridge University Press, 2019) and Sara Crangle for I’m Working Here: The Collected Poems of Anna Mendelssohn (Shearsman Books, 2020).

The 2019 Richard J. Finneran Award was presented to Daniel Balderston for his book How Borges Wrote (The University of Virginia Press, 2018).

The 2017 Richard J. Finneran Award was presented to Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue for their scholarly edition of The Poems of T.S. Eliot. Vols. 1 & 2, “Collected and Uncollected Poems” and “Practical Cats and Further Verses” (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015).

The 2015 Richard J. Finneran Award was presented to Jerome McGann, for A New Republic of Letters: Humanities Scholarship in the Age of Digital Reproduction (Harvard University Press, 2014).

The 2013 Richard J. Finneran Award was presented for The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley, vol. 3, to Co-General Editors: Donald H. Reiman, Neil Fraistat, and Nora Crook; Associate Editors: Stuart Curran, Michael J. Neth, and Michael O’Neill; and Assistant Editor: David Brookshire.

At the 2011 conference at Penn State, the third Finneran Award was presented to Paul Eggert for Securing the Past: Conservation in Art, Architecture, and Literature (Cambridge, 2009), which the judges found to be a “major advancement in the field that all future work will have to reckon with.” The 2011 Finneran Committee consisted of Russell McDonald (chair), James L.W. West III, and Matt Cohen.

At the 2009 conference, the second iteration of the prize went to Matthew Kirschenbaum for his provocative volume, Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination (MIT Press, 2008). Kirschenbaum’s elegant parsing of the materiality of digital texts has had a significant impact on textual studies. The committee also awarded a second place prize to Richard Finneran (posthumously) for his edition of W. B. Yeats’ The Tower (Cornell, 2007). Richard’s children, Rich and Kate, accepted the award in Richard’s memory, along with his sister-in-law Nora. The 2009 Finneran Committee consisted of Peter Shillingsburg, David Holdeman, and James L. W. West, III.

At the 2007 New York conference, the first Finneran Award was presented to Peter Shillingsburg for his wonderful 2006 study, From Gutenberg to Google: Electronic Representations of Literary Texts (Cambridge University Press, 2006). The committee also awarded a second place prize to Philip Gossett for his masterful study Divas and Scholars: Performing Italian Opera (Chicago, 2006). The 2007 Finneran Award Committee consisted of Nancy Goslee, David Holdeman, and George Bornstein.