“Katie McGettigan’s study, The Transatlantic Materials of American Literature: Publishing US Writing in Britain, 1830-1860, offers a sophisticated appraisal of how British editions of American texts often played an integral role in the promotion, dissemination, and appreciation of works by antebellum U.S. authors on both sides of the Atlantic. In the decades preceding the Civil War, a complicated transnational web of shared interests linked North American writers and British publishers in a joint economic and cultural marketplace, one that helped to define American national identity not simply through what was printed but also in terms of what was excluded. McGettigan’s accomplished study, deploying an imaginative range of sources, ably demonstrates how intimately the material and intellectual cultures of the transatlantic literary world were bound together and shaped each other. ”

“Karen Graubart’s book is an extraordinary accomplishment of research and exposition. An exceptional contribution to studies of the cultures of the South Atlantic, it focuses on communities and self-governing groups to reveal everyday political and legal dynamics in the Spanish Atlantic world of the early modern period. Based on a wide range of multilingual research in numerous archives in Spain, Peru, and the United States, it systematically deploys imaginative and innovative methodology, including mapping technology, to fill blank spots in the documentary record. This sophisticated and intriguing work challenges pre-existing narratives and assumptions regarding colonial cultures in the early modern Atlantic world, and substantially re-sets the terms on which we understand these cultures and the people within them. By juxtaposing Christian and western perspectives with insights drawn from other frames of reference, and including the viewpoints of Jewish, Muslim, indigenous, and slave communities, Graubart’s study breaks new ground and succeeds in shifting the dominant Eurocentric premises of the critical heritage in this field.”

“Jamie Martin’s outstanding study of the forerunners and origins of the global economic institutions created in the aftermath of the Second World War challenges many existing preconceptions to advance a highly compelling thesis of utmost significance. While the tensions between sovereignty and external influence following that war, as decolonization progressed and President Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana famously identified the insidious impact of ‘neo-colonialism’, are well known, Martin moves backward in time to the First World War and interwar years to trace the history of the growth of global financial institutions and mechanisms, often linked to the new League of Nations, that laid the groundwork and set the precedent for their more famous descendants. The ostensible separation of the political from the economic, the latter of which was seen or depicted as a ‘natural’ phenomenon, facilitated systematic attempts by these bodies to open spaces within sovereign states to outside power. Drawing on techniques sometimes dating back as far as the nineteenth century, these institutions, he argues, simultaneously managed the great transformation away from empire toward greater sovereignty and self-determination, yet paradoxically did so even as the tentacles of informal empire continued to limit sovereignty and self-determination. Their legacy remained deeply influential in the creation and operation of the Bretton Woods institutions and other purportedly neutral and non-political organizations. The research is phenomenal, the argument succinct and exact. Provocative and perceptive, this is a tour de force.”

“Duncan Bell has produced a work of extraordinary research and reflection investigating prominent transatlantic personalities who dreamt of and advocated various forms of unification of the Anglo-American worlds, at times of the English-speaking world. Their visions of a global order based upon these principles were, he argues, utopian in nature. Focused on four central figures, the journalist W. T. Stead, the novelist and political activist H. G. Wells, the imperial adventurer Cecil Rhodes and the self-made capitalist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, Dreamworld explores an enormous array of primary and secondary sources, displaying an impressive curiosity and depth of understanding. Founded upon massive and wide-ranging research, the book is superbly constructed and closely argued, representing an impressive exercise in the intellectual history of world orders or imaginings.”

“By a coincidence of timing, this groundbreaking work of extraordinary intellectual breadth and depth resonates deeply with our current circumstances. In examining the impact of the 1918-1920 global influenza pandemic on selected British and American modernist literature, including the early realist engagement, Elizabeth Outka introduces a new reading of these seminal texts, one that in various ways was not attuned to the overt public consciousness of the time or later. This work therefore engages a deep rereading of the literature set within a new frame, addressing difficult and illuminating issues of the underlying and contested politics of both remembrance and forgetting. Outka engages and puts in context the simultaneous impact of the war and the pandemic, which shaped the historical mindset in various ways, deliberately or unconsciously preferencing and valuing one form of death over another. Engaging trauma and memory, her work fundamentally invites us to reconsider the influenza pandemic and the seminal literature produced at the time and in its wake. ”

“The judges also wish to recognize the excellent quality of Rielle Navitski, Transatlantic Film Cinephilia: Film Culture Between Latin America and France. This study deploys in-depth research in an extraordinary range of sources to explore the impact of French films and film culture on Latin America during the early Cold War decades. In terms of cultural diplomacy, across much of Latin America, French efforts to enhance their country’s national standing, prestige, and influence included support for the establishment of cinema clubs, movie archives, and film festivals, and offering education in France to aspiring Latin American film-makers. For Latin America’s rising middle classes, an interest in foreign films represented a novel and sophisticated form of social capital. Stimulating and original, Navitski’s lively study offers new insights into long-neglected North-South transatlantic media exchanges. ”

“The US “Culture Wars” is a sophisticated and original contribution to the voluminous historiography of an old but still hotly contested topic: why the United States entered the First World War. Haglund has accomplished the challenging feat of producing yet another original perspective to extend the existing debate. Moving deftly and seamlessly among the assorted fields of international relations, history, conceptual theory, ethnicity and identity, and drawing on illustrations spanning the years from the early twentieth to the early twenty-first centuries, he situates the origins of the ‘special relationship’ in the First World War period. This innovative timeframe challenges both those who locate the relationship’s roots in the early Cold War era and those who trace its beginnings to the period of the ‘great rapprochement’ of the late nineteenth century, or even those who perceive ‘filial’ growth emanating from the 1860s onward. Haglund utilizes the insights of identity politics and argues that battles for national cultural dominance between two politically vocal and demanding ethnic minorities, the Irish and Germans, and ‘Hawthornian’ Americans of British descent, galvanized the latter to abandon neutrality and even Anglophobia and endorse US intervention in 1917. Executed with a sophisticated nuance of outstanding thinking and reflection, this work demonstrates an extraordinary range of reading and conceptual grasp. ”

“This extraordinary and powerful book on the Armenian question addresses a long neglected issue, one perceived at the time as being of great significance to US foreign policy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Based on massive archival research in US, British, French, and Armenian primary and secondary sources, this is a systematic, judicious, and elegantly presented volume. Ottoman Turkey’s treatment of the empire’s largely Christian Armenian minority population, a question that still remains highly contentious in current Turkish politics, attained high international visibility from the 1880s to the early 1920s. Besides excavating the details of the specific questions and issues arising from the case of Armenia, Laderman’s comprehensive and wideranging study illuminates the implications for broader debates over the scope and limits of the global US role. The author not only explores the prominence of the Armenian question and the impact of its influential advocates on US diplomacy during these decades, but links these to the ubiquitous and continuing humanitarian dilemma on questions of intervention and the protection of populations in foreign lands where external great powers sometimes have few or no national interests at stake. ”