The prize is awarded to the best paper delivered by a postgraduate at the HOTCUS Annual Conference. The prize fund is £100.
2019
Elizabeth Evens (University College London) for her paper “Policewomen, Plainclothes, and Pelvic Examinations: NYPD abortion investigations, 1913-1926.”
Honourable mention: Rivers Gambrell (University of Oxford) for her paper “‘Football is perhaps my second vocation’: The Institutionalisation of Richard Nixon’s Sports Fandom (1970-72).”
The committee had the following comments on these papers:
Evens
This paper offers an excellent, multi-layered analysis of the complex role played by police women in the shaping of sexual norms in New York City in the early 20th century. Based on a unique collection of sources, and grounded in an in-depth knowledge of the history of sexuality, the paper represents a significant advance upon existing scholarship. It highlights the multifarious tensions surrounding these police women’s own bodies, their sexuality and those of other New Yorkers, and standards of moral conduct observed during their investigations and later before the courts.
Gambrell
This is a clearly-written, at times humorous, paper demonstrating the connections between President Nixon’s football fandom and his political agenda. The paper made very skilful use of a range of sources, and was extremely well composed and structured. The project of which it is part promises to significantly enhance our understandings of the shifting role sports have played in modern US politics.
2018
Oenone Kubie (University of Oxford) for her paper ‘Enforcing the Color Line: Children and Segregation in Chicago, 1910-1920′
2017
Raleigh Cavero (University of Cambridge) for her paper ‘The First Federal Domestic Violence Legislation in the United States, 1980-1984’
Honourable mention: Thomas Ellis (University of Southampton)
2016
Scott Weightman (University of Leicester and University of Nottingham) for his paper ‘“The Truth For A Change”: The Citizens’ Council Forum, States’ Rights and the Marketability of Segregation’.
Honourable mention: Joshua Hollands (UCL-Institute of the Americas).
2015
Hannah Graves (University of Warwick) for her paper ‘The Value of an Endorsement: Reassessing Hollywood’s ‘Race Year’ Through the Debate over Pinky (1949)’.
Honourable mentions: James Hillyer (UCL-Institute of the Americas) and Joe Ryan-Hume (University of Glasgow).
2014
Alex Ferguson (University of Southampton) for his paper ‘“To Supplement but not to Supplant”: Minister Donald Heath, STEM and Managing the Quiet Americans in French Indochina, 1950-52’.
2013
Alfred Cardone (King’s College London) for his paper ‘“Soldiers, in the Name of Democracy, Let Us All Unite!”: The Tea Party, the Occupy Movement, and Neo-Populism’.