The McNeil Center for Early American Studies is pleased to announce the twelfth annual Zuckerman Prize in American Studies, given in honor of Hyman Zuckerman and Henrietta Zuckerman Landis, parents of University of Pennsylvania Professor of History Emeritus Michael Zuckerman.

The Zuckerman prize offers $2,000 for the best dissertation connecting American history (in any period) with literature and/or art.  Only unpublished dissertations formally accepted between 1 January 2020 and 31 December 2021 qualify for the prize.  Submissions will be evaluated for the seriousness and originality with which the dissertation engages relationships among history, art and/or literature, the significance of the treatment to scholarship in the field, and the overall quality of the writing.

The deadline for submissions is 7 January 2022. Please click here to upload your dissertation.

Applicants should submit a pdf copy of the entire dissertation, and should request a confidential letter from the dissertation director commenting on the intellectual significance of the work, to be uploaded by clicking here or sent by email to mceas@ccat.sas.upenn.edu. The winner will be notified in late spring and announced at the MCEAS final seminar in May.

If you dissertation file is too large to be uploaded, please contact the McNeil Center at mceas@ccat.sas.upenn.edu to make arrangements to send your file via Dropbox.

Questions may be directed to:  mceas@ccat.sas.upenn.edu