Editor's Note: Louis Round Wilson Prize for 2011

The Editorial Board of Studies in Philology voted at its annual meeting in May 2008 to establish an annual prize of $1000 for the best article published in the journal during the previous year. The prize was named in honor of Louis Round Wilson, whose monograph Chaucer's Relative Constructions appeared as the first issue of Studies in Philology in 1906. Wilson was instrumental in founding and establishing SP, and in helping to ensure that it would have a long and vital future.

At the board meeting in May 2012 an editorial committee appointed by the Editor announced that the fourth of these annual awards would go to Curtis Perry of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign for his article "British Empire on the Eve of the Armada: Revisiting The Misfortunes of Arthur," which appeared in the Fall 2011 issue of SP. In that article Professor Perry identifies in Thomas Hughes's Inns of Court tragedy a strong and provocative strain of anti-imperialism just prior to the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588. In Perry's argument, this critique of imperialism has a very specific and potentially perilous brief, namely, support for William Cecil, Lord Burghley's agenda in the embattled world of Elizabethan politics.

We are pleased to have had the opportunity to publish Curtis Perry's study of a neglected play and its bold intervention in the question of Elizabethan imperialism, and we offer him our congratulations on being chosen for this award.

• 2011    Curtis Perry

• 2010    Debora Kuller Shuger

• 2009    David Weil Baker

• 2008    Mary Ann Lund

The editor would also like to congratulate Professor Thomas Festa of the State University of New York, New Paltz, whose contribution to SP in 2009, "The Metaphysics of Labor in John Donne's Sermon to the Virginia Company," has been awarded the annual prize for best essay on Donne from the John Donne Society at this year's MLA meeting.