2027 Cultural Studies Association (CSA) Annual Conference
June 3 – 5, 2027
Fully Online
Registration
Award Description
The Awards Committee of the Cultural Studies Association (CSA) invites authors to compete for the first annual CSA Prize for a First Book, which will be awarded for an outstanding scholarly work published in the previous calendar year as the first book-length publication by a current member of the association.
To qualify for this year’s prize, a book must have a copyright date in the calendar year prior to the conference and be peer-reviewed. It must be the author’s first book. Collaborative and multi-authored books are eligible but scholarly editions, collections of essays, anthologies, and similar edited volumes are ineligible.
Books will be judged on how well they advance and extend the reach of cultural studies as a field, as a method of inquiry, and as an intellectual/political project. The prize, which consists of one year’s waived membership and registration fees to the CSA and a certificate, will be presented to the winning author at the Association’s annual convention. Conference attendance is mandatory to accept the prize.
Submission Process
To enter a book into the competition, authors or publishers should send an electronic copy of the book, author’s CV, and confirmation of the author’s membership & registration with intent of attending the annual CSA conference to Michelle Fehsenfeld: admin@culturalstudiesassociation.org, cc: author/publisher, subject line: FIRST BOOK PRIZE NOMINATION. Publishers may enter more than one title for consideration. Entries may be sent at any time by May 1, 2027. The winner will be announced during the annual meeting and must be present to accept the award.
Award Winners
- Beenash Jafri, Settler Attachments and Asian Diasporic Film, (University of Minnesota Press), 2025
- Corinne Mitsuye Sugino, Making the Human: Race, Allegory, and Asian Americans, (Rutgers University Press), 2025
- Charles Athanasopoulos, Black Iconoclasm: Public Symbols, Racial Progress, and Post/Ferguson America (Palgrave Macmillan), 2025
- Lucia Hulsether, Capitalist Humanitarianism (Duke University Press), 2024
- Arjun Shankar (Honorable Mention), Brown Saviors and Their Others: Race, Caste, Labor, and the Global Politics of Help in India (Duke University Press), 2024
- Eric Morales-Franceschini, The Epic of Cuba Libre: the mambi, mythopoetics, and liberation (University of Virginia Press), 2023
- Josef Nguyen, The Digital is Kid Stuff: Making Creative Laborers for a Precarious Economy (University of Minnesota Press), 2022
- Alyson Spurgas, Diagnosing Desire: Biopolitics and Femininity into the Twenty-First Century (Ohio State University Press), 2021
Honorable Mention
- Lesley A. Wolff, Culinary Palettes: The Visuality of Food in Postrevolutionary Mexican Art, (University of Texas Press), 2025
- Eunsong Kim, The Politics of Collecting: Race & the Aestheticization of Property (Duke University Press) 2024.
- Frank García, Clicas: Gender, Sexuality, and Struggle in Latina/o/x Gang Literature and Film (University of Texas Press) 2024.