The Space Between Society offers a prize for the best essay presented at the annual conference.

If you presented at the 2025 conference, please read the following invitation from Vice President Elizabeth Blake and consider submitting your essay by September 1, 2025.

As is so often the case, I came away from this year’s Space Between Conference feeling intellectually invigorated and with a very long list of things I can’t wait to read—all thanks to the exciting work you presented in Lawrence. Thank you for sharing your research, and thanks again to Aimee Wilson and the conference committee for providing such a wonderful venue for your presentations and our conversations. 

I write now to invite you to submit your papers for the 2025 Space Between Society Essay Prize.

This $250 prize honors the best conference paper submitted to our panel of judges. A short description of the winning paper is published on the Space Between Society website.

To enter your essay for consideration, please email me (Liz Blake) at eblake@clarku.edu with a copy of your conference paper by September 1, 2025. Please title the document as follows 

[Your last name] 2025 Essay Prize

You may include your PowerPoint presentation or related materials if they are central to your paper and your argument, but please make sure the essay reads clearly and legibly without them. If you must polish the paper, we ask that you do so lightly; we are looking for the work you presented at the conference as you presented it. 

Please do submit! All this year’s papers were wonderful. And please feel free to reach out to me directly if you have any questions.

*Please note*: If you have already submitted your essay to the society email, those submissions have been collected and forwarded accordingly. No need to send again.

Past prize winners:

2024: Kyler Schubkegel

2023: Aimee Armande Wilson

2022: Elizabeth Blake, “Embodying Normativity: Betty Crocker at Work.”

2021: Chris Dingwall, “On Being Practicable: Vernon Winslow and the Craft of the New Negro Renaissance.”

2019: Michael Williamson,  “Staging Nineteenth Century Jewish Literary and Religious Culture in the Face of Disaster.”

2018: Ravenel Richardson, “Private Writing as Resistance: Ursula von Kardoff’s Diary of the Second World War.”

2017:  Jennie Lightweis-Goff, “The Dignity of Years and the Crudities of Youth: Gone With the Wind (1936) and the New Southern City.”

2016:  Paula Derdiger, “Surveying the Space Between in Postwar Berlin: Billy Wilder’s A Foreign Affair.”

2015: Joseph Elkanah Rosenberg, “Paper Bombs.”

2014: Michael Williamson, “Doubled Crossings: Yiddish Writers Respond to the Treaty of Non-Aggression Between Germany and Russia.”

2013: Katherine Brucher, “Henry Ford’s ‘Old-fashioned’ Dancing and ‘Early American’ Music: Americanization through Music and Dance.”

2012: Naomi Milthorpe, “Absolute Possession: Evelyn Waugh’s Library.”

2011: no prize awarded

2010: Erin Penner, “Mrs. Dalloway and the Loss of Elegiac Transcendence.”

2009: Alexis Pogorelskin, “The Sounds of Silence: The Mortal Storm in Film.”