Past Winners

Comics Studies Society Prizes | Past Winners

Charles Hatfield Book Prize

2026 | Candida Rifkind and Dominic Davies, Graphic Refuge: Visuality and Mobility in Refugee Comics (Wilfred Laurier University Press)
- Honorable Mention: José Alaniz, Comics of the Anthropocene: Graphic Narrataive at the End of Nature (University Press of Mississippi)
2025 | Samantha Langsdale, Searching for Feminist Superheroes: Gender, Sexuality, and Race in Marvel Comics (University of Texas Press)
- Honorable Mention:James Scorer, Latin American Comics in the Twenty-First Century: Transgressing the Frame (University of Texas Press)

2024 | Margaret Galvan, In Visible Archives: Queer and Feminist Visual Culture in the 1980s (University of Minnesota Press)
- Honorable Mention: Michelle Ann Abate, Blockheads, Beagles, and Sweet Babboos: New Perspectives on Charles M. Schulz’s Peanuts (University Press of Mississippi)
2023 | Ewa Stańczyk, Comics and Nation: Power, Pop Culture, and Political Transformation in Poland (The Ohio State University Press)
- Honorable Mention: Katherine Kelp-Stebbins, How Comics Travel: Publication, Translation, Radical Literacies (The Ohio State University Press)
2022 | Susan E. Kirtley, Typical Girls: The Rhetoric of Womanhood in Comic Strips (The Ohio State UP)
- Honorable Mention: Esther De Dauw, Hot Pants and Spandex Suits: Gender Representation in American Superhero Comic Books (Rutgers UP)
- Honorable Mention: Zack Kruse, Mysterious Travelers: Steve Ditko and the Search for a New Liberal Identity (UP of Mississippi)
2021 | Rebecca Wanzo, The Content of Our Caricature: African American Comic Art and Political Belonging (New York UP, 2020)
- Honorable Mention: Jean Lee Cole, How the Other Half Laughs: The Comic Sensibility in American Culture, 1895-1920 (UP of Mississippi, 2020).
2020 | Jorge Santos, Graphic Memories of the Civil Rights Movement: Reframing History in Comics (University of Texas Press, 2019)
2019 | Lara Saguisag, Incorrigibles and Innocents: Constructing Childhood and Citizenship in Progressive Era Comics (Rutgers UP, 2018)
2018 | Brannon Costello, Neon Visions: The Comics of Howard Chaykin (LSU Press, 2017)

CSS Article Prize

2026 | Eike Exner, “Phenakistiscope and Pantomine Cartoon: The Rise of “Stories without Words” amid the Nineteenth-Century Revolution in Visual Culture, Science, and Technology, 1832-1899″
- Honorable Mention: Emmy Waldman, “OXO, Spiegelman: Tic-Tac-Toe and the Art of Losing”
2025 | Derek Lee, “Is Psylocke Asian? The Racial Fantasy and Ambiguity of an Uncanny Oriental” (Inks)
- Honorable Mention: Nicole Dib, “Who Benefits from Your Ignorance? Visualizing Black (Super)Heroism and Refuting Respectability Politics in Victor LaValle’s Destroyer” (Inks)

2024 | Maite Urcaregui, “Composing Crip Temporalities, or Decomposing Comics in Dumb and Dancing After TEN“ In Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies
- Honorable Mention: Lara Saguisag, “Labor in the Margins: Filipino Comics Workers in the US Comic Book Industry” in Inks
2023 | Brannon Costello, “Strange Daddy: Uprooting the Environmentalist Family Romance in Nancy A. Collins’ Swamp Thing” in INKS (6:1)
- Honorable Mention: Margaret Galvan, “Of Anthologies and Activism: Building an LGBTQ+ Comics Community” in The LGBTQ+ Comics Studies Reader (University Press of Mississippi)
2022 | Vincent Haddad, “Detroit vs. Everybody (Including Superheroes): Representing Race through Setting in DC Comics.” Inks 5.3
- Honorable Mention: Daniel Stein, “Black Bodies Swinging: Superheroes and the Shadow Archive of Lynching.” Closure 7.5
- Honorable Mention: Justin Wigard, “‘The Fearless Spaceman Spiff, Interplanetary Explorer Extraordinaire’: Parodic Imagination and the Pulp Aesthetic in Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes.” Inks 5.2
2021 | Sydney Phillips Heifler, “Romance Comics, Dangerous Girls, and the Importance of Fathers”
- Honorable Mention: Maite Urcaregui, “(Un)documenting Single-Panel Methdologies and Epistemologies in the Non-fictional Cartoons of Eric J. García and Alberto Ledesma”
2020 | Dan Mazur, “Ibrahim Njoya, a Comics Artist in Colonial-Era Cameroon,” The Comics Journal
2019 | André M. Carrington, “Desiring Blackness: A Queer Orientation to Marvel’s Black Panther, 1998–2016,” published in American Literature
2018 | Benoît Crucifix, “Cut-up and Redrawn: Charles Burns’s Swipe Files” published in Inks: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society

CSS Prize for Edited Collection

2026 | Fernanda Díaz-Basteris and Maite Urcaregui, eds. Latinx Comics Studies: Critical and Creative Crossings (Rutgers University Press)
2025 | Georgiana Banita and Lee Konstantinou, eds. Artful Breakdowns: The Comics of Art Spiegelman (University Press of Mississippi)
2024 | Qiana Whitted, ed. Desegregating Comics: Debating Blackness in the Golden Age of Comics (Rutgers UP)
2023 | Eleanor Ty, editor, Beyond the Icon: Asian American Graphic Narratives (The Ohio State University Press, 2022)
- Honorable Mention: María Porras Sánchez and Gerardo Vilches, editors, Precarious Youth in Contemporary Graphic Narratives: Young Lives in Crisis (Routledge)
2022 | Benjamin Woo and Jeremy Stoll, editors of The Comics World
- Honorable Mention: Jamie Brassett and Richard Reynolds, editors of Superheroes and Excess
2021 | Anna F. Peppard, editor. Supersex: Sexuality, Fantasy, and the Superhero
- Honorable Mention: Frederick Luis Aldama, editor. Graphic Indigeneity: Comics in the Americas and Australasia
- Honorable Mention: Dominic Davies and Candida Rifkind, editors. Documenting Trauma in Comics: Traumatic Pasts, Embodied Histories, and Graphic Reportage
- Honorable Mention: Martha Kuhlman and José Alaniz, editors. Comics of the New Europe: Reflections and Intersections
2020 | Tahneer Oksman and Seamus O’Malley, The Comics of Julie Doucet and Gabrielle Bell (University of Mississippi Press, 2019)

Hillary Chute Award for Best Graduate Student Paper

2026 | Sayeong Kim, “Cultural Crossings in Comics: The Legacy of Kim San-ho, the First Korean Comic Artist in the U.S. Comics Industry”
2025 | Marissa A. Zerangue, “‘So you thought you would exploit another person’s tragedy’: Mystery, Gender, and Race in Mat Johnson’s Incognegro: A Graphic Mystery”
- Honorable Mention: Ishita Sehgal, “Memory, Colors and Gutters: Reading Graphic Memoirs”
2024 | Morgan Podraza, “‘Get Your Scissors’: Comics’ Black Paper Dolls and Their Readers”
- Honorable Mention: Anu Sugathan, “Drawing Justice: Narratives of Resilience and Disruption in Orijit Sin’s River of Stories“

2023 | Adrienne Resha, “‘Brown People with Bad Résumés’ in Four Color Comics: Simon Baz and Critical Color Theory in Green Lantern and Green Lanterns”
- Honorable Mention: Evelyn Vasquez, “Socializing the Tenement as Depicted in Comic Art”
2022 | Kay Sohini, “The Peculiarity of Time”
- Honorable Mention:Bryan Bove, “It Can’t All Be Sorrow: Confronting Trauma Through Television in Marvel’s WandaVision“
- Honorable Mention: Adrienne Resha, “Good Is Not a Thing You Are, It’s a Thing Superheroes Do: Kamala Khan and the Identity Pause in Ms. Marvel, Superhero Bildungsroman”
2021 | Maite Urcaregui, “Political Geographies of Race in James Baldwin and Yoran Cazac’s Little Man, Little Man”
- Honorable Mention: Clémence Sfadj, “Windows on Everyday Harlem: The Cartoons of Ollie Harrington”
2020 | Haniyeh Barahouie, “Mapping the War in Zeina Abirached’s A Game for Swallows: To Die, To Leave, To Return”
2019 | Isabelle Martin, “‘The Weight of Their Past’: Reconstructing Memory and History through Reproduced Photographs in Thi Bui’s Graphic Novel The Best We Could Do”
2018 | Alex Smith, “Breaking Panels: Gay Cartoonists’ Radical Revolt”

Gilbert Seldes Prize for Public Scholarship

2026 | Anna Peppard and J. Andrew Deman, Sequential Scholars
- Honorable Mention: Vera Camden and Valentino Zullo, “Graphic Memoirs of Childhood: Raina Telgemeier Draws a New Generation”
- Honorable Mention: Christina Lee, “The Complicated Feminist Legacy of Underground Comix”
2025 | Felipe Rodolfo Hendriksen, “Batman patiens: Patience in Batman: Year One (1987)” (Vault of Culture)
- Honorable Mention: Asher Elbein, “The Judgment Of Magneto” (Defector)
- Honorable Mention:John A. Walsh et al.. “Comic Book Paratexts” (Self Published)

2024 | Nick Sousanis & Emily Beitiks, “Comics Beyond Sight: A Highly Visual Case for Blind Access” in Technology Review
- Honorable Mention: Regina Marie Mills, “‘Across the Spider-Verse’ and the Latino Legacy of Spider-Man” in The Conversation
- Honorable Mention: Ravynn K. Stringfield, “Flying Toward a Twenty-First Century Aesthetics of Technomagic Girlhood” in Vault of Culture
2023 | Reya River Enza, “Controlling Fascism with Surrealism on Tradd Moore’s Variant Cover for The Department of Truth #4” on WWAC
- Honorable Mention: Anna Peppard, “Nightcrawler is a Sex-Positive Superhero. Here’s How—And Why it Matters” on WWAC
2022 | Ritesh Babu, “Civilized Monsters: These Savage Shores and the Colonialist Cage” (NeoText Review)
- Honorable Mention: Vincent Haddad, “‘That Wingnut is Insane’: Reality vs. Fictionality in Conspiracy Comics”
- Honorable Mention: Anna Peppard, Andrew Deman, Chrisopher Maverick, and Shawn Gilmore, Oh, Gosh! Oh, Golly! Oh, Wow! Episode #5: “Send in the Clowns”
2021 | Zachary J.A. Rondinelli, “#WelcomeToSlumberland Social Media Research Project”
- Honorable Mention: Anna F. Peppard, “(Behold?) The Vision’s Penis: The Presence of Absence in Mutant Romance Tales”
2020 | Zoe D. Smith, “4 Colorism, or, the Ashiness of it All” and “4 Colorism, or, White Paper/Brown Pixels,” Women Wrote About Comics
2019 | Osvaldo Oyola
- Guess Who’s Coming Home for the Holidays: Intergenerational Conflict in Bitch Planet,” The Middle Spaces, Dec. 11, 2018
- “‘I AM (not) FROM BEYOND!’: Situating Scholarship & the Writing ‘I’”, The Middle Spaces, Dec. 25, 2018
- “YA = Young Avengers: Asserting Maturity on the Threshold of Adulthood,” The Middle Spaces, Oct. 16, 2018

CSS Dissertation Prize

2026 | Cassia Helena Hayward Fitch, “I was Drawn This Gay: Queer Community Activism in the Serial Comics of Alison Bechdel and Howard Cruse” (University of East Anglia)
2025 | Christian Hines, #THEKIDSAREALRIGHT: Interrogating and Enacting Youth Empowerment Via Comics Pedagogies in a High School Book Club (The Ohio State University)
- Honorable Mention: Adrienne Resha, From Superman to Sana Amanat: Alienation, Assimilation, and American Superhero Comics, 1938 to Present (The College of William and Mary)
2024 | Anna Vuorinne, Understanding Abuse and Justice Through Genres: Migration and Human Rights in Contemporary German Comics
- Safiyya Hosein, The Iconic Muslim Superhero: Muslim Female Audience Perspectives of Marvel’s Muslim Superheroines
2023 | Eva Van de Wiele, Building a Glocalised Serial for Children (University of Ghent)

Frederick Luis Aldama Emerging BIPOC Comics Studies Leadership Award

2026 | Anu Sugathan (University of Oregon)
2025 | Adrienne Resha (University of Virginia)
2024 | Victoria Rahbar (University of British Columbia)
- Christian Hines (Texas State University)
2023 | Kofi Bazzell-Smith (University of Illinois)

You can see the videos for 2022 Awardees Here!