ASAP promotes the best scholarship concerning the literary, visual, performing, and media arts, and we are committed to promoting the work done by members of the association. To this end, the association sponsors scholarly prizes for the best book published each year and the best graduate student paper delivered at the association’s conference.
Prizes
Book Prize
ASAP: The Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present invites nominations and self-nominations for its annual Book Prize, awarded to a scholarly book written by an ASAP member that has made the most significant contribution to the study of the arts of the present during the calendar year 2024. Books with a 2025 publication date must wait for the following year. Any English-language book that addresses the contemporary arts published anywhere in the world may be considered for this award.
The members of the Book Prize Committee this year and are
Sarah Dowling, Past President of ASAP
Jennifer Doyle, President of ASAP
Lindsay Thomas, ASAP Member at Large and prior winner of the ASAP Book Prize
Julia Bryan-Wilson, prior winner of the ASAP Book Prize
The deadline is May 15, 2025.
Rules for Competition
Eligibility
Authors must be members of ASAP at the time of submission.
Current members of the ASAP Executive Committee are not eligible.
The award is for scholarly work rather than creative production (creative writing,
original artwork, etc.), though we understand that submissions may challenge these
boundaries.
Jointly authored monographs and exhibition catalogues will be considered.
Textbooks, anthologies, collections by multiple authors, bound editions of journals, and
books in an edition other than the first will not be considered.
Self-published work is not eligible for the award.
All submissions must be peer-reviewed publications.
Books must be in English.
Publisher, third-party, and self-nominations are encouraged.
There are no limits on the number of books that one publisher can submit.
Any issues not considered in this call will be resolved by the Prize Committee and the ASAP Executive Committee. Decisions by the Prize Committee and the Executive Committee are final.
Submission guidelines
The books must be mailed to each member of the committee. Email a website link to the book and your contact information to ; you will then receive the mailing addresses.
Print copies are required. Authors with books that are natively electronic and offer no possibility of printed copy may contact the Chair to request consideration. All books must be postmarked by the submission deadline of May 15, 2025. We strongly recommend the use of mailing services with tracking numbers to avoid any issues. Submitted books will not be returned even if they are deemed ineligible. For more information about the prize, including a list of previous winners, visit http://www.artsofthepresent.org/prizes/.
Graduate Student Conference Paper Prize
All graduate students who presented a talk at ASAP/15 in 2024, either virtually, or in Seattle, are eligible to compete for the prize. The author must be a member of the association in good standing at the time of nomination. The winner will be announced at the annual meeting of the association (ASAP/16 in Houston, TX October 16-18, 2024), as well as via the association’s website and social media thereafter. The winner will receive a $200 cash prize.
ASAP Graduate Student Prize submission information will be made later this year.
Rules for Competition
- Only current ASAP members in good standing can submit work for consideration for the graduate student paper award.
- Papers considered for the prize must have been presented at the previous year’s ASAP conference.
- Papers may be self-nominated or nominated by members of the association who attended the conference at which the paper was presented.
- The paper must be the paper presented at the conference. It should not be in any way revised or edited for consideration by the prize committee.
- Longer papers submitted to seminars are eligible, but submissions longer than 12 double-spaced pages (works cited excluded) will not be accepted.
- Papers must be submitted electronically to the chair of the prize committee by the deadline.
- The paper must be the same version as the presentation at ASAP/14. It should not be revised or edited in any way. Papers pre-circulated to seminars are eligible, but submissions longer than 12 double-spaced pages (works cited excluded) will not be accepted.
Send nominations, self-nominations, and submissions directly to
Maia Gil’Adi’ at . Use the subject line: ASAP Graduate Student Prize. Submissions are due by Tuesday, October 1, 2024. Please keep this deadline in mind when making nominations.
Winners
2020 Book Prize
Darby English
To Describe a Life: Notes from the Intersection of Art and Race Terror (Yale 2019)
Darby English asks, “how do you do representation in a crisis?” Taking on the fraught subject of police killings of Black people, English explores the foundational violence of the United States, capturing the urgency of our historical conjuncture. He reckons with the hypervisibility and obliteration of Black life, but chooses, counter-intuitively, to ask for a pause that allows artworks to unsettle us at moments of intense political engagement. Eschewing blanket solutions as well as a simple though righteous anger, English centers on ruminative objects and projects to expand our sense of what the future might hold beyond the impasses of the present. In doing so, he reckons with the unfolding of a “massively demoralizing tragedy without the comfort of consoling narratives or satisfying conceptualizations.” English slows down our ready mobilization of polarizing categories (us/them, good/bad) in order to stage a real relationship with particular qualities rather than a relationship between abstract preconceptions which seem only to be able to clash violently.
Exploring Zoe Leonard’s Tipping Point, Kerry James Marshall’s untitled 2015 portrait of a Black male police officer, Pope.L’s Skin Set Drawings, and a replica of the Lorraine Motel (the site of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination in 1968), English urges us to rethink the work of art in relation to love, judgment, difference, and violence.
The committee found his formal analysis of Kerry James Marshall in “The Painter and the Police” especially outstanding. English lets Marshall’s picture be challenging and weird, in relation to the perceived critique of the command “Stop Killing Us” generated by the Black Lives Matter movement. That English cannot orient himself in relation to the figure of the Black policeman with any composure becomes for him a meaningful starting place for analysis. He then takes very subtle observations about the artist’s choices – with regard to color, spatial illusion, whether and where the surface would be smooth or textured – and makes them have real consequences for his argument. He in effect has a lengthy relationship in writing with the particular qualities of the picture, demonstrating his point about what is needed, or what would be better than our reigning tendencies. Finding Marshall’s difficulty salutary rather than stifling, English asks us to attend to the irreducible in matter and space, thought and feeling.
The 2020 ASAP Book Prize committee was: Yogita Goyal (chair, Professor, African American Studies and English, University of California, Los Angeles), Elise Archias (Associate Professor, Art History, University of Illinois, Chicago), and Kenneth Warren (Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professor, English, University of Chicago).
ASAP11 Graduate Student Conference Paper Prize
Maggie Unverzagt Goddard
Ph.D. candidate, American Studies, Brown University
Maggie Unverzagt Goddard’s “Aesthetic Strategies for Political Action: Doreen Garner and Black Youth Project 100” identifies a meeting point between Black Youth Project 100’s activism and the work of visual artist Doreen Garner as they both explore the legacies of violence and violation that shape the past and present of Black women’s experience, particularly in the health care system. The paper describes BYP100’s recent public protest calling for the removal of a statue dedicated to the “father of modern gynecology” who experimented on Black women, James Marion Sims, alongside Garner’s photographs and installations that often features medical equipment and amputated limbs. In the blurred boundary between art and activism Goddard describes the potential for new modes of visuality and reading strategies that attend to the political work of aesthetics. Committee members praised Goddard’s evocative descriptions and close analysis of public performances, fine art photography, and installation work. Reading across visual objects, “Aesthetic Strategies” enacts the same expansive and nonlinear approach as the artwork it explores; thus, it is able to acknowledge the continued trauma that motivates this work while offering “a beauty in persistence” as a generative aesthetic strategy.
The 2020 ASAP Graduate Student Conference Paper Prize committee was: Yogita Goyal (chair, University of California, Los Angeles) and Lauren M. Cramer (University of Toronto).
Past Winners
Faye Raquel Gleisser, Risk Work: Making Art and Guerrilla Tactics in Punitive America, 1967–1987 (University of Chicago Press, 2023)
As US news covered anticolonialist resistance abroad and urban rebellions at home, and as politicians mobilized the perceived threat of “guerrilla warfare” to justify increased police presence nationwide, artists across the country began adopting guerrilla tactics in performance and conceptual art. Risk Work tells the story of how artists’ experimentation with physical and psychological interference from the late 1960s through the late 1980s reveals the complex and enduring relationship between contemporary art, state power, and policing.
Focusing on instances of arrest or potential arrest in art by Chris Burden, Adrian Piper, Jean Toche, Tehching Hsieh, Pope.L, the Guerrilla Girls, Asco, and PESTS, Faye Raquel Gleisser analyzes the gendered, sexualized, and racial politics of risk-taking that are overlooked in prevailing, white-centered narratives of American art. Drawing on art history and sociology as well as performance, prison, and Black studies, Gleisser argues that artists’ anticipation of state-sanctioned violence invokes the concept of “punitive literacy,” a collectively formed understanding of how to protect oneself and others in a carceral society.
Tina Post, Deadpan: The Aesthetics of Black Inexpression (NYU Press, 2022).
Arguing that inexpression is a gesture that acquires distinctive meanings in concert with blackness, Deadpan tracks instances and meanings of deadpan—a vaudeville term meaning “dead face”—across literature, theater, visual and performance art, and the performance of self in everyday life.
Tina Post reveals that the performance of purposeful withholding is a critical tool in the work of black culture makers, intervening in the persistent framing of African American aesthetics as colorful, loud, humorous, and excessive. Beginning with the expressionless faces of mid-twentieth-century documentary photography and proceeding to early twenty-first-century drama, this project examines performances of blackness’s deadpan aesthetic within and beyond black embodiments, including Young Jean Lee’s The Shipment and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Neighbors, as well as Buster Keaton’s signature character and Steve McQueen’s restitution of the former’s legacy within the continuum of Black cultural production.
Through this varied archive, Post reveals how deadpan aesthetics function in and between opacity and fugitivity, minimalism and saturation, excess and insensibility.
Lindsay Thomas, Training for Catastrophe: Fictions of National Security after 9/11 (University of Minnesota Press, 2021).
Why would the normally buttoned-down national security state imagine lurid future scenarios like a zombie apocalypse? In Training for Catastrophe, author Lindsay Thomas shows how our security regime reimagines plausibility to focus on unlikely and even unreal events rather than probable ones. With an in-depth focus on preparedness (a pivotal, emergent national security paradigm since 9/11) she explores how fiction shapes national security.
Thomas finds fiction at work in unexpected settings, from policy documents and workplace training manuals to comics and video games. Through these texts—as well as plenty of science fiction—she examines the philosophy of preparedness, interrogating the roots of why it asks us to treat explicitly fictional events as real. Thomas connects this philosophical underpinning to how preparedness plays out in contemporary politics, emphasizing how it uses aesthetic elements like realism, genre, character, and plot to train people both to regard some disasters as normal and to ignore others.
Training for Catastrophe makes an important case for how these documents elicit consent and compliance. Thomas draws from a huge archive of texts—including a Centers for Disease Control comic about a zombie apocalypse, the work of Audre Lorde, and the political thrillers of former national security advisor Richard Clarke—to ask difficult questions about the uses and values of fiction. A major statement on how national security intrudes into questions of art and life, Training for Catastrophe is a timely intervention into how we confront disasters.
How do you keep the cracks in Starry Night from spreading? How do you prevent artworks made of hugs or candies from disappearing? How do you render a fading photograph eternal—or should you attempt it at all? These are some of the questions that conservators, curators, registrars, and exhibition designers dealing with contemporary art face on a daily basis. In Still Life, Fernando Domínguez Rubio delves into one of the most important museums of the world, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, to explore the day-to-day dilemmas that museum workers face when the immortal artworks that we see in the exhibition room reveal themselves to be slowly unfolding disasters.
Still Life offers a fascinating and detailed ethnographic account of what it takes to prevent these disasters from happening. Going behind the scenes at MoMA, Domínguez Rubio provides a rare view of the vast technological apparatus—from climatic infrastructures and storage facilities, to conservation labs and machine rooms—and teams of workers—from conservators and engineers to guards and couriers—who fight to hold artworks still.
As MoMA reopens after a massive expansion and rearranging of its space and collections, Still Life not only offers a much-needed account of the spaces, actors, and forms of labor traditionally left out of the main narratives of art, but it also offers a timely meditation on how far we, as a society, are willing to go to keep the things we value from disappearing into oblivion.
Sianne Ngai, Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form (Harvard UP, 2020).
Deeply objectionable and yet strangely attractive, the gimmick comes in many guises: a musical hook, a financial strategy, a striptease, a novel of ideas. Above all, acclaimed theorist Sianne Ngai argues, the gimmick strikes us both as working too little (a labor-saving trick) and working too hard (a strained effort to get our attention).
When we call something a gimmick, we register misgivings that suggest broader anxieties about value, money, and time, making the gimmick a hallmark of capitalism. With wit and critical precision, Ngai explores the extravagantly impoverished gimmick across a range of examples: the fiction of Thomas Mann, Helen DeWitt, and Henry James; the video art of Stan Douglas; the theoretical writings of Stanley Cavell and Theodor Adorno. Despite its status as cheap and compromised, the gimmick emerges as a surprisingly powerful tool in this formidable contribution to aesthetic theory.
Book Prize
Justin Jesty, Art and Engagement in Early Postwar Japan (Cornell University Press, 2018)
Honorable Mentions
Stephen Best, None Like Us: Blackness, Belonging, Aesthetic Life (Duke University Press, 2018)
&
David Parisi, Archaeologies of Touch: Interfacing with Haptics from Electricity to Computing (University of Minnesota Press, 2018)
The 2019 ASAP Book Prize judges were Karen Benezra, Rebecca Janzen, and Joseph Jeon (chair)
Graduate Student Conference Paper Prize
Hayley O’Malley (Ph.D. candidate, English, University of Michigan), “Filming Everyday Freedom: The Black Feminist Praxis of Kathleen Collins’s Filmography”
The 2019 Graduate Student Conference Paper Prize judges were Elise Archias, Tatiana Flores, and Joseph Jeon (chair)
Book Prize
Julia Bryan-Wilson, Fray: Art and Textile Politics (University of Chicago Press, 2017)
The 2018 ASAP Book Prize judges were Aimee Bahng, Mark Goble (chair), and Rachel Middleman
Book Prize (co-winners)
Ramzi Fawaz, The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics (New York University Press, 2016)
&
Annie McClanahan, Dead Pledges: Debt, Crisis, and Twenty-First-Century Culture (Stanford University Press, 2016)
The 2017 ASAP Book Prize judges were Sarah Chihaya, Jonathan P. Eburne, Ignacio Sánchez Prado, and Molly Warnock
Book Prize
Angela Naimou, Salvage Work: U.S. and Caribbean Literatures amid the Debris of Legal Personhood (Fordham University Press, 2015)
Honorable Mentions
J. D. Connor, The Studios after the Studios: Neoclassical Hollywood (1970-2010) (Stanford University Press, 2015)
&
Paul Stephens, The Poetics of Information Overload: From Gertrude Stein to Conceptual Writing (University of Minnesota Press, 2015)
The 2016 ASAP Book Prize judges were Marijeta Bozovic, Jonathan P. Eburne, and Matthew Jesse Jackson
Book Prize
Heather Houser, Ecosickness in Contemporary U.S. Fiction: Environment and Affect (Columbia University Press, 2014)
Honorable Mention
Sarah Brouillette, Literature and the Creative Economy (Stanford University Press, 2014)
The 2015 ASAP Book Prize judges were Jacob Edmond, Gloria Fisk, and Matthew Hart
Book Prize
Peter Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art (Verso, 2013)
Honorable Mention
Min Hyoung Song, The Children of 1965: On Writing, and Not Writing, as an Asian American (Duke University Press, 2013)
The 2014 ASAP Book Prize judges were Sarah Evans, Andrew Hoberek, and Joseph Jeon
Book Prize
Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (Verso, 2012)
Honorable Mention
Jacob Edmond, A Common Strangeness (Fordham University Press, 2012)
The 2013 ASAP Book Prize judges were Karen Jacobs, Jesse Matz, and Terry Smith
Book Prize
Kenneth Goldsmith, Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age (Columbia University Press, 2011)
Honorable Mention
Terry Smith, Contemporary Art: World Currents (Prentice Hall, 2011)
The 2012 ASAP Book Prize judges were Amy Elias, Andrew Hoberek, and Melissa Lee
Graduate Student Conference Paper Prize
Nilgun Bayraktar (Ph.D. candidate, Performance Studies, University of California, Berkeley), “The Production of Migrant Illegality: Social Infrastructures of Undocumented Mobility in Ursula Biemann’s Sahara Chronicle”
The 2012 ASAP Graduate Student Conference Paper Prize judges were Matthew Hart and Jesse Matz