The HOTCUS Article Prize and Early Career Article Prize recognize the outstanding research being published by HOTCUS members. A prize of £100.00 will be awarded to the best article on a twentieth-century US history topic published in a peer-reviewed scholarly journal during the previous calendar year. All the details for the 2025 round of applications are available below.
HOTCUS 2025 Article Prize and 2025 Early Career Article Prize
HOTCUS welcomes applications for its 2025 Article Prize and 2024 Early Career Article Prize, both of which recognise the outstanding research published by HOTCUS members.
The 2025 Early Career Article Prize is open to doctoral (and pre-doctoral) students and recent PhD graduates not yet in academic employment, as well as those on short-term (less than three years), fractional, or hourly paid contracts.
HOTCUS is dedicated to fostering a culture of diversity and inclusion, and so particularly encourages submissions from women and scholars from minority backgrounds, who have been traditionally underrepresented in previous competitions.
For both the Article Prize and the Early Career Article Prize, £100 will be awarded to the best article on a twentieth-century US history topic published in a peer-reviewed scholarly journal during the 2024 calendar year. Articles published in 2024 as “First View” (i.e. online only and not yet part of a specific issue published in 2024) are eligible, but articles can only be submitted for consideration once. Submissions may be made by authors or editors. Authors may be at any career stage, but they must be members of HOTCUS. Authors may submit one article per year.
The HOTCUS committee will judge entries according to the following criteria:
Potential contribution or significance to both the specific sub-field and the wider field of twentieth century American history;
Originality and quality of research undertaken, and/or sophistication of methodological approach applied;
Value and accessibility to both specialist and non-specialist readers
To enter, authors or editors should email a PDF of their article to
[email protected] by the deadline below. Please specify whether you
are eligible for the Early Career Article Prize in your email.
The deadline for entries is January 31, 2025.
Previous Winners
For full details on each year’s prize and the committee’s commendations please click here
2024: Nicholas Grant (University of East Anglia) ‘Patriotism and Black Internationalism‘ published in Modern American History.
Early Career: Jennifer Chochinov (King’s College London) ‘”True Patriots and Democrats”: U.S. Student Activism in Cold War-era Spain‘ published in Diplomatic History.
2023: Zoe Colley (University of Dundee) ‘Erasing Minds: Behavioral Modification, the Prison Rights Movement, and Psychological Experimentation in America’s Prisons, 1962–1983‘ in the Journal of American Studies.
Early Career: Stephen Colbrook (University of Oxford) ‘Clandestine Networks and Closeted Bureaucrats: AIDS and the Forming of a Gay Policy Network in California‘ in the Journal of Policy History.
2022: Christian O’Connell (University of Gloucestershire) ‘A Roman Holiday? African Americans and Italians in the Second World War‘ in History.
Early Career: Emma Day (University of Oxford) ‘The Fire Inside: Women Protesting AIDS in Prison since 1980’ in Modern American History.
2021: Patrick Hagopian (Lancaster University) ‘The Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial and the Politics of Post-Racialism,’ in History and Memory.
Early Career: Sarah Thomson (University of Edinburgh) ‘Presidential Travel and the Rose Garden Strategy: a case study of Ronald Reagan’s 1984 tour of Europe,’ in Presidential Studies Quarterly.
2020: Kaeten Mistry (University of East Anglia) ‘A Transnational Protest Against the National Security State’: Whistle-Blowing, Philip Agee, and Networks of Dissent’ in Journal of American History.
2019: Daniel Matlin (Kings College London) ‘ʺA New Reality of Harlem”: Imagining the African American Urban Future during the 1960s’ in Journal of American Studies.
2018: Christopher Phelps (University of Nottingham), “The Sexuality of Malcolm X” in Journal of American Studies.
2017: Maria McGrath (Bucks County Community College), “Living Feminist: The Liberation and Limits of Countercultural Business and Radical Lesbian Ethics at Bloodroot Restaurant” in The Sixties: Journal of History, Politics and Culture.