Richard Beale Davis Prize, 2009–10

Honorable Mention: Peter Jaros

From a rich field of excellent scholarship published over the last two years in Early American Literature, the Richard Beale Davis Prize for the best article published during 2009–10 is awarded to Joseph Rezek, whose essay, “The Orations on the Abolition of the Slave Trade and the Uses of Print in the Early Black Atlantic” (EAL 45.3), combines astute close reading, a keen awareness of the critical context, deep learning, and broad speculation, in an elegant manner that exemplifies the best in early American literary research. Rezek’s penetrating essay offers an important revisionary approach to the literature of the early black Atlantic, emphasizing the circulation of printed texts in addition to the circulation of writers as a key methodological paradigm, and drawing our attention to a valuable and understudied archive. These orations “utilized print to announce their place in the black Atlantic world and through that announcement to shape, reciprocally, the contours of that world.” The topic is intrinsically important, and the approach has broad implications for future inquiry. Rezek received his Ph.D. from UCLA in 2009, where his dissertation was entitled “Tales from Elsewhere: Fiction at a Proximate Distance in the Anglophone Atlantic, 1800–1850.” He is a 2009–11 Barra Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, and joins the faculty at Boston University in fall 2011.

The Davis Prize selection committee also awards Honorable Mention to Peter Jaros for “Personating Stephen Burroughs: The Apparitions of a Public Specter” (EAL 44.3), which adroitly addresses questions of publicity, performance, and theatricality to provide a fresh and persuasive reading of the notorious Stephen Burroughs’s Memoirs, arguing for “a new perspective on the relation between publicity and performance, crystallized in the eighteenth-century term personating.” His essay offers important new terms and categories for thinking about identity in the early national period and beyond. Jaros received his Ph.D. from Northwestern University, with a dissertation entitled “Persons, Publics, Physiognomics: Reading and Performing Character in the Early Republic.” He is an assistant professor at Franklin and Marshall College.

Davis Prize Committee: