Louis D. Rubin, Jr. Prize

Black and white photograph of Louis D. Rubin. He is an older man wearing large black glasses with white gray hair. He's smiling for the camera.

 

The Society for the Study of Southern Literature awards the Louis D. Rubin, Jr. Prize for best article on southern literature published in a peer-reviewed journal. The prize honors the legacy of Dr. Rubin, who founded the society, established the Southern Literary Journal and the southern literary series from LSU Press, and started the careers of many writers and critics.

 

Winner for 2020

Eve Dunbar, “Loving Gorillas: Segregation Literature, Animality, and Black Liberation.” American Literature 92.1 (March 2020): 123-149.
Honorable Mention: Sunny Yang, “Expanding the Southscape to the Global South: Remapping History and Afro-Vietnamese Intimacy in Yusef Komunyakaa’s Dien Cai Dau.” African American Review 53.2 (Summer 2020): 79-93. 

Past Winners

2019 Samantha Pergadia, “Like an Animal: Genres of the Nonhuman in the Neo-Slave Narrative.” African American Review, 51.4 (Winter 201): 289-304; Honorable Mention: Katherine Adams, “Du Bois, Dirt Determinism, and the Reconstruction of Global Value.” American Literary History. 31.4 (Winter 2019): 715-740.

2018 Leigh Anne Duck, “Commercial Counterhistory: Remapping the Movement in Lee Daniels’ The Butler.” Journal of American Studies. 52.2 (May 2018): 418-446; Honorable Mention: Andrew Sargent, “To Counter a Mockingbird: White Heroism, Black Sacrifice, and Racial Innocence in William Melvin Kelley’s A Different Drummer.” African American Review 51.1 (Spring 2018): 37-54.

2017 Lara Langer Cohen, “Solomon Northup’s Singing Book.” The African American Review 50.3 (Fall 2017): 259-272.

2016 Douglas J. Flowe, “Folklore, Urban Insurrection, and the Killing of the Black Hero in the Turn of the Century South.” Mississippi Quarterly 67.4 (2014): 581-603.

2015 Jennie Lightweis-Goff, “Interior Travelogues and ‘Inside Views’: Gender, Urbanity, and the Genre of the Slave Narrative” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 41.1 (2015): 179-198.

2014 Patricia Stuelke, “’Times When Greater Disciplines Were Born’: The Zora Neale Hurston Revival and the Neoliberal Transformation of the Caribbean,” American Literature 86.1 (2014): 117-145.

2013 Amy Clukey, “Plantation Modernity: Gone with the Wind and the Irish-Southern Culture,” American Literature, 2013 (3): 505-530.

2012 Michael Bibler, “How to Love Your Local Homophobe: Southern Hospitality and the Unremarkable Queerness of Truman Capote’s ‘The Thanksgiving Visitor,'” Modern Fiction Studies 2012 (58.2): 284-307.