Awards

MELUS offers several competitive prizes: the Katharine Rodier Graduate Student Travel Award, the MELUS Graduate Student Travel Award, the MELUS President’s Contingent Faculty Travel Award, the MELUS Best Essay Award, and the 2023-24 MELUS Book Prize.

The MELUS Award for Distinguished Contribution to Ethnic Studies or the Lifetime Achievement Award, the Society’s highest accolades, honors esteemed colleagues and scholars in multiethnic studies.

Recipients of the 2024 MELUS Prizes:

  • Katherine Newman MELUS Best Essay Award: Daniel Valella, “Crystal City’s ‘Alien’ Farmworkers: Tomás Rivera’s  . . . y no se lo tragó la tierra and the Shared Histories of Chicanx and Japanese Detention” (Spring 2023, 48.1)
  • MELUS Lifetime Achievement Award: Martha J. Cutter, PhD, University of Connecticut
  • MELUS Lifetime Achievement Award: Kim Martin Long, PhD, University of New Orleans
  • MELUS Graduate Student Travel Award: Carlos Tkacz, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, “Open Futures: Seasonal Apocalypses and Disrupted Models in N. K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season”
  • Katharine Rodier Graduate Student Travel Award: Evelyn Vasquez, University of California San Diego, “Planning Ghetto Topographies: Unstable Housing Depictions in Crane, Winnemucca, and Dunbar”
  • MELUS President’s Contingent Faculty Award: Seon Myung Yoo, Texas A&M University, “Decolonial Afro-Asian Solidarity in Emily Jungmin Yoon’s Poetry”
  • SMU Travel Awards:
    Jeslyn Pool, University of New Mexico, “Feminist Aesthetics of Form within M.   Nourbese Philip’s Archival Destruction: Zong!”;
    Mariana Leticia Romero, New York University, “The Southwest is a landscape full of     power’: Reading Mosquito’s Dialogic Ramblings Across the US/Mexico Border”;
    Christianna Anneke Snyder, Texas A&M University, “En el Camino of Strangers:   Journeys of Identity and Nostalgia in Hartman and Cantú’s Fulbright Memoirs”

Recipients of the 2023 MELUS Prizes:

  • MELUS Award for Distinguished Contribution to Ethnic Studies: David Roediger, PhD, University of Kansas
  • MELUS Lifetime Achievement Award: A Yęmisi Jimoh, PhD, University of Massachusetts Amherst
  • Best Essay Award: Alec Pollak, “Toni Morrison’s Their Eyes Were Watching God,” published in the Spring 2022 issue (47.1). Honorable Mention: Joseph Wei, “Postmemory Workshops: Vietnamese American Poets, Refugee Memory Work, and Creative Writing” published in the fall issue (47.3)
  • MELUS Graduate Student Travel Awards: Rojda Idil Arslan, M.A. student, West Virginia University; Julia Brush, PhD Candidate, University of Connecticut; Abbey Corcoran, M.A. Student, University of Utah; Stephanie Couey, PhD Candidate, University of Colorado Boulder; Julianna Crame, PhD Candidate, the Ohio State University; Irma J. Zamora, PhD Candidate, the Ohio State University

Recipients of the 2022 MELUS Prizes:

  • MELUS President’s Contingent Faculty Travel Award: Jessica Fitzpatrick
  • MELUS Graduate Student Travel Award: Hollis Druhet, PhD Student, University of Illinois
  • Katharine Rodier Graduate Student Travel Award: Eunice Toh, PhD Student, Pennsylvania State University
  • Best Essay Award: Jina B. Kim, “Toward an Infrastructural Sublime: Narrating Interdependency in Karen Tei Yamashita’s Los Angeles,” Summer 2020 (45.2)

Recipient of the 2021 MELUS Prize:

  • MELUS Award for Distinguished Contribution to Ethnic Studies: MaryJo Bona, PhD, SUNY Stonybrook

Recipient of the 2020 MELUS Prize:

  • Best Essay Award: Samantha Pinto and Jewel Pereyra, “The Wake and the Work of Culture: Memorialization Practices in Post-Katrina Black Feminist Poetics,” Fall 2019 (44.3)

Recipients of the 2019 MELUS Prizes:

  • MELUS Award for Distinguished Contribution to Ethnic Studies: Viet Thanh Nguyen
  • MELUS President’s Contingent Faculty Travel Award: Brittany Henry, PhD, Rice University
  • MELUS Graduate Student Travel Award: Jessica Thielen, PhD student, University of Delaware;
  • Katharine Rodier Graduate Student Travel Award:  Julie Yeeun Kim, MA student, California State University Long Beach
  • Best Essay Award: Caroline H. Yang. “The Asian-Owned Store and the Incommensurable Histories of War in Narratives of the City” Summer 2018 (43.2)

Recipients of the 2018 MELUS Prizes:

  • Lifetime Achievement Award: Sally Ann Ferguson
  • MELUS President’s Contingent Faculty Travel Award
  • MELUS Graduate Student Travel Award: Nancy Carranza, Chrysta Wilson
  • Katharine Rodier Graduate Student Travel Award: Abigail Manzella
  • Best Essay Award: Mary I. Unger, “Literary Justice in the Post-Ferguson Classroom,” Winter 2017 (42.4)

Recipients of the 2017 MELUS Prizes:

  • MELUS President’s Contingent Faculty Travel Award: Sue Shon, Univ. of Washington, for “Runaway Slave Portraiture and the Emergence of Racial Blackness”
  • MELUS Graduate Student Travel Award: Ande Davis, Univ. of Missouri-Kansas City for “After Jim Kelly: Hip Hop and Kung Fu Hybridization in the New Millennium,”
  • Katharine Rodier Graduate Student Travel Award: Ryan Charlton, Univ. of Mississippi  for “‘[T]o all intents an Esquimo’: The Inuit in Matthew Henson’s A Negro Explorer at the North Pole”
  • Best Essay Awards: Marlene Hansen Esplin, “Self-translation and Accommodation: Strategies of Multilingualism in Gloria Anzaldua’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza and Margarita Cota-Cárdenas’s Puppet,” Summer 2016 (41.2); AND Elizabeth Windle, “‘It Never Really Was the Same’: Brother to Brother’s Black and White and Queer Nostalgia,” Winter 2016 (41.4)

Recipients of the 2016 MELUS Prizes:

  • MELUS Award for Distinguished Contribution to Ethnic Studies: Rey Chow
  • Lifetime Achievement Award: Wenying Xu
  • President’s Contingent Faculty Award: Nancy El Gendy, “Veiling, Unveiling, Reveiling in Mohja Kahf’s The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf”
  • Graduate Student Travel Awards: Katherine Newman Graduate Student Travel: Justin Mellete, “’You didn’t see color you saw dirt’: Southern Racial Ideology in the Works of Monique Truing and Cynthia Kadohata”; Katharine Rodier Graduate Student Travel Award: Savannah Hall, “Going Suntan: Fashion-Forward Performances of Race in 1920s American Literary and Visual Culture of the Suntan Vogue”
  • Katherine Newman MELUS Best Essay Award: Kinohi Nishikawa, “The Archive on Its Own: Black Politics, Independent Publishing, and The Negotiations,” Fall 2015 (40.3); Honorable mention: Mark Sussman, “Charles W. Chesnutt’s Stenographic Realism,” Winter 2015 (40.4)

Recipients of the 2015 MELUS Prizes:

  • MELUS Award for Distinguished Contribution to Ethnic Studies: Karla F.C. Holloway
  • Lifetime Achievement Award: Bonnie Tu Smith
  • Katherine Newman MELUS Best Essay Award: Teresa A. Goddu, “Anti-Slavery’s Panoramic Perspective,” Summer 2014 (39.2)

Recipients of the 2014 MELUS Prizes:

  • MELUS Award for Distinguished Contribution to Ethnic Studies: Fred Gardaphe
  • Katharine Rodier Graduate Student Travel Award: Mevi Hova, University of Nebraska–Lincoln, “Redefining the Black Diaspora: Identity and Migration Narratives in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah”
  • Graduate Student Travel Award: Coleen Eils, The University of Texas at Austin
    “The Limits of Literature in Salvador Plascencia’s The People of Paper”
  • President’s Contingent Faculty Award: Cathryn Josefina Merla-Watson,
    “Feeling Chicana: Decolonial Feminism and Love as Resistance in Lorna Dee Cervantes’s Ciento”
  • Katherine Newman MELUS Best Essay Award: Margaret Hillenbrand, “Letters of Penance: Writing America in Chinese and the Location of Chinese American Literature” Fall 2013 (38.3)

Recipients of the 2013 MELUS Prizes:

  • MELUS Award for Distinguished Contribution to Ethnic Studies: Lisa Lowe
  • Katherine Newman MELUS Best Essay Award: Lesley Larkin, “Reading as Responsible Dialogue in Ana Castillo’s The Mixquiahuala Letters,” Fall 2012 (37.3)

Previous winners of the MELUS Award for Distinguished Contribution to Ethnic Studies

2012 Houston Baker
2011 Gerald Vizenor
2010 Cheng Lok Chua
2009 Shirley Geok-lin Lim
2008 John Lowe
2007 Amritjit Singh, Thadious Davis
2005 Tey Diana Rebolledo
2004 Joe Skerrett
2003 Werner Sollors
2000 Helen Barolini
1998 Helen Jaskoski
1997 Amy Ling
1996 Eric Sundquist and Nellie McKay
1995 Michael S. Harper and Jules Chametzky
1994 Barbara Christian
1993 Daniel Walden
1992 Charles Nilon
1991 Jean Fagan Yellin
1990 Paul Lauter
1989 Mitsuye Yamada
1988 Charles Nichols
1987 John M. Reilly
1986 A. LaVonne Ruoff
1985 Blyden Jackson
1983 Brom Weber
1982 Katherine Newman
1979 Nicolas Kanellos
1974 Robert E. Spiller

Katharine Rodier Graduate Student Travel Award

Amount: $300.00

To apply: Submit your conference abstract to the MELUS graduate student representative by the yearly conference CFP deadline. If accepted into the conference program, your abstract will then move into the second phase of consideration by the travel awards committee.

Criteria: The committee bases their selection on relevance of the paper to conference theme and to interests of general MELUS membership; the extent to which the paper makes a contribution to/intervention in ethnic studies; the originality/uniqueness of the abstract; and when needed (i.e., if two abstracts are equal in the extent to which they fulfill the above criteria), consideration of distance from the applicant’s institution to the conference site.

Eligible: Applicants for the two graduate student awards must be current graduate students and must submit individual abstracts, rather than panel submissions. Because there are two graduate student awards, graduate students are not eligible for the contingent faculty award. While the MELUS executive committee recognizes that many graduate students also work as contingent faculty, we reserve the contingent faculty award for faculty that typically have less access to institutional funding. Award winners must attend the conference in order to receive their award and be recognized at the awards ceremony.

MELUS Graduate Student Travel Award

Description: In support of the professional development and growth toward the future of the academic study of multi-ethnic literature that graduate students represent, the MELUS Graduate Student Travel Award supports current graduate students who wish to attend the organization’s yearly conference.

Amount: $300.00

To apply: Submit your conference abstract to the MELUS graduate student representative by the yearly conference CFP deadline. If accepted into the conference program, your abstract will then move into the second phase of consideration by the travel awards committee.

Criteria: The committee bases their selection on relevance of the paper to conference theme and to interests of general MELUS membership; the extent to which the paper makes a contribution to/intervention in ethnic studies; the originality/uniqueness of the abstract; and when needed (i.e., if two abstracts are equal in the extent to which they fulfill the above criteria), consideration of distance from the applicant’s institution to the conference site.

Eligible: Applicants for the two graduate student awards must be current graduate students and must submit individual abstracts, rather than panel submissions. Because there are two graduate student awards, graduate students are not eligible for the contingent faculty award. While the MELUS executive committee recognizes that many graduate students also work as contingent faculty, we reserve the contingent faculty award for faculty that typically have less access to institutional funding. Award winners must attend the conference in order to receive their award and be recognized at the awards ceremony.

MELUS President’s Contingent Faculty Award

Description: In support of the valuable work of contingent faculty, the MELUS President’s Contingent Faculty Award supports non-tenure-track terminal degree holders who wish to attend the organization’s yearly conference.

Amount: $400.00

To apply: Submit your conference abstract to the MELUS graduate student representative by the yearly conference CFP deadline. If accepted into the conference program, your abstract will then move into the second phase of consideration by the travel awards committee.

Criteria: The committee bases their selection on relevance of the paper to conference theme and to interests of general MELUS membership; the extent to which the paper makes a contribution to/intervention in ethnic studies; the originality/uniqueness of the abstract; and when needed (i.e., if two abstracts are equal in the extent to which they fulfill the above criteria), consideration of distance from the applicant’s institution to the conference site.

Eligible: Applicants for the contingent faculty travel award must be non-tenure track faculty who possess terminal degrees, including adjuncts, visiting assistant professors, independent scholars, etc. While the MELUS executive committee recognizes that many graduate students also work as contingent faculty, we reserve the contingent faculty award for faculty that typically have less access to institutional funding. Award winners must attend the conference in order to receive their award and be recognized at the awards ceremony.