The Hennig Cohen Prize
Since 1998, the Melville Society has honored the memory of Professor Hennig Cohen with an annual award for the best article, book chapter, or essay in a book about Herman Melville. In addition to his founding roles in the American Studies Association, American Quarterly, and the Melville Society, the late Hennig Cohen (1919-96) was a dedicated teacher, scholar, and modern editor of Herman Melville's works.
Please consider submitting or nominating articles and chapters on the works of Herman Melville published in the prior calendar year for consideration for the Hennig Cohen Prize. Preference is given to newer scholars in the field of Melville studies.
Nominations, including self-nominations, for the 2023 Hennig Cohen Prize should be sent to hennigcohenprize@gmail.com by Sept. 15, 2024. The nominated essay, article, or book chapter should have been published in 2023. Please attach to the email as a PDF the piece to be considered.
Previous Cohen Award Winners
2021:
Daniel Diez Couch and Michael Anthony Nicholson, for their article, “Silent Eloquence: Literary Extracts, the Aesthetics of Disability, and Melville’s ‘Fragments,’” which was published in Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies.
2020:
Édouard Marsoin, for his article, “‘No Land of Pleasure Unalloyed’: Economies of Pleasure and Pain in Melville’s Typee and Omoo,” which was published in J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists.
(2020 Honorable Mention: Kenyon Gradert, for “Paradise Lost?,” the epilogue to his book Puritan Spirits in the Abolitionist Imagination.)
2019:
Kellen T. Bolt, for “Squeezing Sperm: Nativism, Queer Contact, and the Futures of Democratic Intimacy in Moby-Dick,” which was published in ESQ in October 2019.
2018:
Natasha Hurley, for “Acquired Queerness: The Sexual Life and Afterlife of Typee,” chapter 1 of Circulating Queerness: Before the Gay and Lesbian Novel
(2018 Honorable Mention: Lauren Kimball)
2017:
Spencer Tricker, for “‘Five Dusky Phantoms’: Gothic Form and Cosmopolitan Shipwreck in Melville’s Moby-Dick,” in Studies in American Fiction.
2016:
Matthew Knip, for “Homosocial Desire and Erotic Communitas in Melville’s Imaginary: The Evidence of Van Buskirk,” in ESQ: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture (2016 Honorable Mention: Kelly Ross)
2015:
Paul Hurh, for "Dread: Space, Time, and Automata in The Piazza Tales," in American Terror: The Feeling of Thinking in Edwards, Poe, and Melville
2014:
John Cyril Barton, for "Melville, MacKenzie, and Military Executions," in Literary Executions: Capital Punishment and American Culture, 1820-1925
2013:
Jennifer Greiman, for “Circles upon Circles: Tautology, Form, and the Shape of Democracy in Tocqueville and Melville,” in J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists
2012:
Christopher Freeburg, for “Embodying the ‘Assaults of Time’: ‘The Encantadas,’” in Melville and the Idea of Blackness
2011:
Dominic Mastroianni, for "Revolutionary Time and the Future of Democracy in Melville's Pierre," in ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance
2010:
Cody Marrs, for "A Wayward Art: Battle-Pieces and Melville's Poetic Turn," in American Literature
2009:
Jeannine Marie DeLombard, for "Salvaging Legal Personhood: Melville's Benito Cereno," in American Literature
2008:
Hester Blum, for "Douglass's and Melville's 'Alphabets of the Blind,'" in Frederick Douglass and Herman Melville: Essays in Relation, ed. Robert S. Levine and Samuel Otter
2007:
Matthew Cordova Frankel, for "Tattoo Art: The Composition of Text, Voice and Race in Melville's Moby-Dick," in ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance
2006:
Jeffory A. Clymer, for "Property and Selfhood in Herman Melville's Pierre," in Nineteenth-Century Literature
2005:
Geoffrey Sanborn, for “Whence Come You, Queequeg?” in American Literature
2003:
Ralph James Savarese, for "Nervous Wrecks and Ginger-nuts: Bartleby at a Standstill," in Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies
2002:
Robin Grey, for "Annotations on Civil War: Melville's Battle-Pieces and Milton's War in Heaven," in Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies
2001:
Caleb Crain, for "The Heart Ruled Out: Melville's Palinode," in American Sympathy: Men, Friendship, and Literature in the New Nation
2000:
Maurice S. Lee
1999:
Samuel Otter
1998:
Geoffrey Sanborn
Current Cohen Prize Winner
The 2022 Hennig Cohen Prize has been awarded to Justina Torrance for her essay, “Melville’s Milton: Of the Devil’s Party and Knows It," published in A New Companion to Herman Melville, edited by Wyn Kelley and Christopher Ohge (Blackwell).