SSAG Award for Best Publication on the American Gothic – Society for the Study of the American Gothic

The SSAG Award for Best Publication on the American Gothic will alternate between best monograph and best article / book chapter. Next year’s award will be for best article or book chapter on the American Gothic published in 2025 or 2026. Tom Hillard serves as the coordinator of awards for SSAG.

2026

The Society for the Study of the American Gothic is pleased to announce the winner of its 2026 award for Best Scholarly Monograph on the American Gothic. This award recognizes outstanding scholarship in the field of American Gothic studies, celebrating and honoring exceptional research, writing, argument and analysis, as well as distinctive innovations and contributions to American Gothic studies. For this 2026 award, monographs published in 2024 and 2025 were eligible for nomination.

From among a very rich slate of nominees, the jury is excited to announce that the 2026 Best Scholarly Monograph on the American Gothic goes to Maisha Wester’s African American Gothic in the Era of Black Lives Matter (Cambridge University Press, 2025).

Here are some accolades shared by the jury:

“Maisha Wester’s African American Gothic in the Era of Black Lives Matter provides probing and thoughtful analysis of an impressively up-to-date list of recent fiction and film that creates a new corpus within the African American Gothic tradition. With its exploration of anti-Blackness and monstrosity, this book makes a powerful contribution to our understanding of the Gothic generally and African-American Gothic specifically in our contemporary moment.”

“This timely book offers a theoretically-solid and evidence-backed analysis of contemporary American Gothic in an era of unprecedented visibility of the chronic violence against Black bodies. This elegant and concise study examines the necro-politics of African American existence, the strangeness of white identity and the tragic consequences for Black protagonists. The study is brilliantly written, deeply relevant for the American Gothic and will be extremely useful for both researchers and teachers, laying out clearly the main principles of an analysis that Wester had developed into a unique critical focus in recent years.”

“In her own words, this lucid examination and identification of Black Lives Matter Gothic post-2016 is ‘an introduction to a rich and complex vein of US Black Gothic,’ a field which Wester has defined and brought to critical attention. A perfect characterization of the American Gothic—or indeed the Gothic mode—is Wester’s description of the protagonists of BLM Gothic, ‘both ghost of the past and spectre of the future, seemingly far away but already here.’”

Honorable Mention

In addition to Wester’s winning monograph, the SSAG Awards jury would also like to give honorable mention to another nominated monograph: Sarah Robertson’s Gothic Appalachian Literature (Anthem, 2024).

Some words of praise from the jury:

“Sarah Robertson’s Gothic Appalachian Literature provides a condensed but thorough exploration of a major geographical and cultural area of the US, demonstrating a coherence of thematic obsessions that run throughout a wide range of texts, including 19th-, 20th-, and 21st-century fiction, poetry, and drama. Through close readings, it argues convincingly for a distinct ‘Appalachian Gothic’ that is particularly relevant in our contemporary American Gothic, especially in its focus on war and addiction.”

“Gothic Appalachian Literature offers an original and timely examination of recent Gothic fiction from the Appalachian region, an area deeply affected by extraction and symbolically associated with the current political regime in the USA. The study looks at ‘war and diseases of despair,’ such as addiction, in its first section, extractivism and climate in its second, and finally a section on race and LGBTQ issues. The book makes a convincing case for the uniqueness of this regional focus, distinguishing it from the Southern Gothic and turning a critical and compassionate eye on the characters of these novels (and poems) and the monstrous forces that they have had to contend with over the last centuries. Robertson’s study effectively demonstrates how the Gothic offers a space of reflection on ecocritical, political, and historical issues through a unique poetics of haunting and horror, and offers a fresh analysis of a region that has a unique and ambivalent place in the American cultural imagination.”

I would like to thank the SSAG Awards jury members – Bridget Marshall, Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet, and Faye Ringel – whose hard work and many hours of attentive reading and careful deliberation made this Award possible.

2025

The Society for the Study of the American Gothic is pleased to announce the winner of its 2025 award for Best Scholarly Article or Book Chapter on the American Gothic. This award recognizes outstanding scholarship in the field of American Gothic studies, celebrating and honoring exceptional research, writing, argument and analysis, as well as distinctive innovations and contributions to American Gothic studies. For this 2025 award, journal articles and book chapters in edited collections published in 2023 and 2024 were eligible for nomination.

From among a very rich slate of nominees, the jury is excited to announce that the 2025 Best Scholarly Article or Book Chapter on the American Gothic goes to Hannah Lauren Murray’s “Get in and Get Out: White Racial Transformation and the US Gothic Imagination” (published in Humanities 12.6, 2023). Happily, the essay is open access. https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/12/6/129

Please join us in congratulating the author!

2024

The inaugural SSAG Award for Best Monograph on the American Gothic goes to Bernice M. Murphy for The California Gothic in Fiction and Film. Our congratulations go to Bernice, who will receive a plaque and a check for $250 USD.

The awards committee consisted of Tom Hillard (presiding), Charles Crow, Monika Elbert, Jerrold Hogle, and Amala Poli. The committee would also like to acknowledge Kristopher Woofter and Kali Simmons for their initial help in brainstorming the SSAG Awards process and helping get it off the ground.

Of the nominated books and the winner, The California Gothic in Fiction and Film, the committee writes:

The awards jury was struck by the excellent quality of all nine of the monographs that were nominated, and among that very rich slate of nominees we’re excited to announce that the 2024 Best Monograph on the American Gothic goes to Bernice M. Murphy’s The California Gothic in Fiction and Film (Edinburgh University Press, 2022).

Here are some accolades shared by the jury:

“Murphy’s book is a beautifully written and pioneering introduction to a new field of gothic scholarship . . . California Gothic (2022) presents a nuanced, cutting-edge analysis of California’s contribution to the development of Gothic fiction and film. Capturing the recurrent unease of the California dream’s underside, Murphy identifies precisely what is at stake in anxieties about the California dream. Seamlessly moving between David Lynch’s use of horror tropes in subverting the starlet Hollywood fantasy in Mulholland Drive (2001) and cult fantasies in less-known films like The Invitation (2015) and 1BR (2019), Murphy demonstrates the long-standing influence of the Californian nightmare in horror film.”
“Exhaustively researched, very well organized, and always precise in its consistently convincing arguments, Murphy’s California Gothic is, for now at least, the definitive go-to book on its subject. It strikes a fine balance between the vast and the specific: unfolding the historical sweep of California coming to see its many dark undersides in a wide range of Gothic forms, explaining the causes and different avenues of development within that anamorphic mirroring at every stage, and honing in, with brilliant analyses, on both landmark and lesser-known films to make them reveal the fundamental drives of Hollywood and California-Cult Gothic with a richness of insight available nowhere else.”