Paper Prizes

The Association promotes high quality scholarship through its awards program, which recognize the best work by a younger scholar and the best work by any scholar in our many fields submitted to our annual conference. The two paper prizes are given only for papers published in Social Science History during the previous year. The winning papers are selected by the journal’s editorial board.

Founder’s Prize (Best Overall Article in Previous Year)

A $1,000 prize to be awarded annually for the best article published in the preceding volume year of the Association’s official journal, Social Science History. The selection is made by a vote of the Editorial Board, in a two-stage process. Nominations are solicited from the full membership of the board by June 30th of the year following a volume’s publication. Nominations include a brief explanation of what is particularly extraordinary of the nominated article. A sub-committee of the board consisting of 3 members, the Co-Editors and the Managing Editor, review the top nominated articles with the expectation that they will select a winner by early September. The winner will be notified by mid-September with the hope that they can plan to attend the meeting in November where they will receive a check and a plaque.

2025 Award

Carolyn Swope
“The Spatial Configuration of Segregation, Elite Fears of Disease, and Housing Reform in Washington, D.C.’s Inhabited Alleys”
Social Science History Volume 48, Issue 2, pp. 173-201.

Past Winners

2024

Dave Hacker, Martin Dribe and Jonas Helgertz
“Wealth and Child Mortality in the Nineteenth-Century United States: Evidence from Three Panels of American Couples, 1850–1880.” Social Science History, Volume 47, Issue 3

2020

Steven Sprick Schuster, Matthew Jaremski and Elisabeth Ruth Perlman
An Empirical History of the US Postal Savings System.

2019

Kinga Makovi
The Signatures of Social Structure: Petitioning for the Abolition of the Slave Trade in Manchester.

2018

Lisa D. Cook, Trevon D. Logan and John M. Parman
Racial Segregation and Southern Lynching.

2017

Richard Sutch
The One Percent across Two Centuries: A Replication of Thomas Picketty’s Data on the Concentration of Wealth in the United States.

2015

Rebecca Jean Emigh, Dylan Riley and Patricia Ahmed
The Racialization of Legal Categories in the First U.S. Census.

2014

Andrew Walder
Rebellion and Repression in China, 1966-1971.

Graduate Student Paper Prize (Best Article by a Graduate Student in Two Previous Years)

A $500 prize to be awarded biennially for the best article by a graduate student published in the Association’s official journal, Social Science History. The prize, to be awarded at the annual fall meeting of the Social Science History Association, also includes a stipend of up to $250 to cover the recipient’s travel expenses to the conference as well as a one-year subscription to Social Science History.