Issue 10: The Inaugural Prize Issue
Post45 Journal is honored to introduce this special issue featuring the recipients of the 2024 Post45 Essay Prize competition. In fall 2023, Post45 solicited submissions for two article prizes: the Mary Esteve Emerging Scholar Essay Prize, open to current graduate students and pre-tenure scholars no more than 5 years out from Ph.D. graduation, and the Post45 Essay Prize for Contingent Scholars, open to any scholar with a Ph.D. in hand but without a tenure-track position. In January 2024, we were pleased to receive far more submissions than we anticipated, a total of 80 across the two prizes. The submissions were also of an exceptionally high quality, making the decision process incredibly difficult. Fortunately, we had a wonderful group of judges: in addition to journal co-editors Annie McClanahan (UC Irvine) and Arthur Wang (University of Pennsylvania), we were joined by Managing Editor Nia Judelson (Emory University) and Post45 Collective board members Sean McCann (Wesleyan University) and Rachel Greenwald-Smith (St. Louis University). After a multi-stage process, we selected two winners and three honorable mentions for the Emerging Scholar Prize, and one winner and one honorable mention for the Contingent Scholar Prize. Those award-winning essays then went through a complete peer review process, and we are delighted to publish them in this special issue. Honorees received books from Stanford University Press's Post*45 Series, courtesy of the publisher. The winning essays also received small cash awards, generously funded by contributions from current and past members of the Post45 Collective board and by an Open Access Award from the Open Library of Humanities.
Because it honors the breadth and range of new work in the field of post-war American literary and cultural studies, this issue has no theme: rather than bringing together essays on a shared topic or method, it reflects precisely the diversity of work that emerging scholars are doing across the field. The essays here take up themes from queerness and masculinity to imperialism and climate change, and they deploy methods and engage theoretical genealogies from formalism to feminism. Their archives are likewise diverse, ranging from canonical texts to popular culture. What they share, however, is an abiding commitment to reimagining the field shorthanded by the term "post45," expanding its archives, its geographies, its political commitments, and its modes of reading. Many of these essays are richly interdisciplinary, reflecting engagements with history, theory, visual studies, sound and music studies, and other traditions. But all of them indicate a careful, generous, illuminating attention to the specificity of their central texts, whether poems, music videos, novels, or graphic texts. Taken together, they suggest that despite institutional pressures, a declining job market, and the other material obstacles emerging and contingent scholars face in the present moment, post45 literary and cultural studies remain both remarkably vibrant and enduringly vital.
The Mary Esteve Emerging Scholar Prize was awarded to two essays, Amanda Jennifer Su's "The Dragon Lady and the Cold War: Pearl S. Buck's Liberal Feminism in Imperial Woman" and Mitch Therieau's "The Ambient Mode." "The Dragon Lady and the Cold War" brilliantly unearths a neglected episode in the history of postwar feminist thought and expression. In Pearl S. Buck's 1956 novel Imperial Woman, Su compellingly finds both a Betty Friedan-like critique of American gender ideology and a reckoning with the complicity with liberal empire that would bedevil feminist thought in the decades to come. Therieau's essay offers a tour-de-force reading of Alexandra Kleeman's Something New Under the Sun as the self-dissolving cli-fi of slow apocalypse. Therieau uses Kleeman to articulate a broader theory of the ambient as the dissolving of climate "background" into daily "foreground."
We also named three honorable mentions for the Emerging Scholar Prize: Michael James Harrington's "Wild West Fringe: The Cowboy's Queer Trace," Anna Moser's "The Variant: Form as Deliberative Practice," and Christopher Spaide's "Please, Please, Please: The Mourned Musician in Recent American Poetry." Harrington's essay limns a vivid archive of "camp-cowboy imagery," brilliantly foregrounding the traces of queer and Black life that not only pervade, but establish, the image of the American cowboy. Moser's essay on literary variants — forms of posited textual possibilities that are not reconciled, from Emily Dickinson through Susan Howe — queries the status of a feminism whose ideal subject is she-who-choses, arguing that poetic form allows us to see the complexity of choosing itself. Spaide's article will appear in Post45 Journal in the future.
The winner of the Contingent Scholar Prize was Marie Buck, for her essay "For Malcolm and Embodied Collectivity in the Early Black Arts Movement," which reevaluates the uses of masculinity in 1960s Black cultural politics. Through a careful consideration of the "near-obsessive" focus on masculinity as a metaphor for communicability in the idiosyncratic 1967 Broadside Press anthology For Malcolm: Poems on the Life and Death of Malcolm X, Buck demonstrates that Black masculinity was never reducible to Black Macho. Honorable Mention went to Emmy Waldman, for "Metamorphoses of the Spiral: Art Spiegelman's Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*!" Waldman's daring essay moves deftly between close readings of Spiegelman's signature spiral motifs and ambitious arguments about his uptake and transformations of modernist literature and art.
As noted above, our Emerging Scholar Prize is named in honor of Mary Esteve, two-time co-editor of Post45 (from 2010 to 2015 and from 2020 to 2023) and one of our most frequent and most incisive peer reviewers. We are enduringly grateful to Mary for her service to Post45 Journal and to the Post45 Collective as a whole, and are honored to celebrate her contributions with this prize. We are also grateful to the Open Library of Humanities for providing the grant that made these prizes possible. Post45 is a scholar-led organization unaffiliated with a university press or commercial publisher. Unlike most of our peer journals, Post45 Journal operates with zero income: we receive no revenue from subscriptions or ads; charge no membership dues or registration fees for our annual symposia; and earn no royalties for book sales in our Stanford University Press series. We are privileged to be among a small number of diamond open access, online, peer-reviewed humanities journals in the U.S., a status that makes us completely accessible to readers around the world, regardless of institutional status.
Since its inception, Post45 Journal has been committed to publishing the work of emerging scholars. It was an honor to read the brilliant, innovative, ambitious work of 80 early-career scholars as part of the prize competition, and we are delighted to publish this special issue featuring the very best of those essays.
Annie McClanahan is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Irvine and author of Dead Pledges: Debt, Crisis, and 21st Century Culture (Stanford University Press), winner of the 2017 ASAP Book Prize, and Beneath the Wage: Tips, Tasks, and Gigs in the Age of Service Work (Zone Books, 2026). She co-edited Post45 Journal from 2020 to 2025.