Graduate Student Paper Award

The Graduate Student Paper Award is presented by the Science Fiction Research Association to the outstanding scholarly essay read at the annual conference of the SFRA by a graduate student.

Previous winners

Previous winners include:

• 1999 - Shelley Rodrigo Blanchard, " 'Resistance is Futile,' We Are Already Assimilated: Cyborging, Cyborg Societies, Cyborgs, and The Matrix."
• 2000 - Sonja Fritzsche, "Out of the Western Box: Rethinking Popular Cultural Categories from the Perspective of East German Science Fiction."
• 2001 - Eric Drown and Sha LaBare (tie). Drown for "Riding the Cosmic Express in the Age of Mass Production: Independent Inventors as Pulp Heroes in American SF 1926-1939" and LaBare for "Outline for a Mode Manifesto: Science Fiction, Transhumanism, and Technoscience."
• 2002 - Wendy Pearson, "Homotopia? Or What's Behind a Prefix?"
• 2003 - Sarah Canfield Fuller, "Speculating about Gendered Evolution: Bram Stoker's White Worm and the Horror of Sexual Selection."
• 2004 - Melissa Colleen Stevenson, "Single Cyborg Seeking Same: The Post-Human and the Problem of Loneliness."
• 2005 - Rebecca Janicker, "New England Narratives: Space and Place in the Narratives of H.P. Lovecraft."
• 2006 - Linda Wight, "Magic, Art, Religion, Science: Blurring the Boundaries of Science and Science Fiction in Marge Piercy's Cyborgian Narrative."
• 2007 - Joseph Brown, "Heinlein and the Cold War: Epistemology and Politics in The Puppet Masters and Double Star."
• 2008 - Unknown
• 2009 - Dave Higgins, “The Imperial Unconscious: Samuel R. Delany’s The Fall of the Towers"
• 2010 - Andrew Ferguson, “Such Delight in Bloody Slaughter: R. A. Lafferty and the Dismemberment of the Body Grotesque”
• 2011 - Bradley Fest, "Tales of Archival Crisis: Stephenson’s Reimagining of the Post-Apocalyptic Frontier," and Honorable Mention: Erin McQuiston, "Thank God It’s Friday: Threatened Frontier Masculinity in Robinson Crusoe on Mars"
• 2012 - Florian Bast, "Fantastic Voices: Octavia Butler’s First-Person Narrators and ‘The Evening and the Morning and the Night.’"
• 2013 - W. Andrew Shephard, "'Beyond the Wide World's End': Themes of Cosmopolitanism in Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination"
• 2014 - Michael Jarvis, "'Wherever you go, there you are': Postmodern Pastiche and Oppositional Rhetoric in The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension"
• 2015 - W. Andrew Shephard, “'What is and What Should Never Be': Paracosmic Utopianism in Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World"
• 2016 - Dagmar Van Engen, “The Interspecies Erotic: Sex and the Nonhuman in Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis Trilogy”
• 2017 - Francis Gene-Rowe, “You Are The Hero: Stephen Mooney’s The Cursory Epic”
• 2018 - Josh Pearson, “New Weird Frankenworlds: Speaking and Laboring Worlds in Cisco’s Internet of Everything"
• 2019 - Grant Dempsey, “Did they tell you I can Floak?’: Living Between Always and Sometimes, in China Miéville’s Embassytown.”
• 2020 - Conrad Scott, “‘Changing Landscapes’: Ecocritical Dystopianism in Contemporary Indigenous SF Literature.”
• 2021 - No award given due to COVID-19 pandemic
• 2022 - John Landreville, “‘Speculative Metabolism: Digesting the Human in Upstream Color.”
• 2023 - Josie Holland, “Constructing Radical Queer Futures and Deconstructing Noir Fiction in The Penumbra Podcast”
• 2024 - Vicky Brewster, “Simulated Worlds and Digital Disruptions: Gothic Glitch in The Tenth Girl”