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Helen Tartar First Book Subvention
Nominations for this prize are now closed.
Award Overview
The ACLA Executive Board is pleased to continue with our Helen Tartar First Book Subvention Program. This program is designed for ACLA-member authors who require subventions to ensure publication of their first books. The ACLA will award up to $10,500 in subventions each year with up to three awards of $3,500 each. These subventions will be awarded on a competitive basis to first-time book authors. Applicants who have already secured provisional contracts from established academic presses will be given special consideration, but a provisional contract is not a requirement for the award. Subventions will be paid directly to the press.
Application Process
Please make sure to follow these instructions to the letter to ensure that your application is received and processed. Please compile the following documents. Label each file with the document name, followed by the applicant’s last name and first name. For example: Book Proposal-Schmidt-John.pdf
- A standard humanities book proposal that includes a short description, a summary of the manuscript in no more than 1,000 words, chapter summaries, as well as information on the book’s relationship to the field, market, and methods.
- A completed application form (which includes both the author’s application as well as the publisher’s application). A link to the author form may be found here. A link to the form for publishers is here.
- The applicant's Curriculum Vitae.
- A complete manuscript.
Applications must be submitted online (by logging in as an acla.org user) by November 15th, 2023 (11:59pm EST). Applications will be reviewed by the ACLA Publications Committee in consultation with the Executive Board. Decisions will be final. The awards will be announced at the ACLA annual meeting in 2023.
If you have questions, please direct them to the ACLA Chief Administrative Officer, Danielle Fanucchi: dfanucchi@acla.org
Emails should carry the subject line: “ACLA Helen Tartar Book Subvention". Please note that email applications will not be accepted. All applications must be submitted through the acla.org website.
2022-2023 Helen Tartar First Book Subvention Winners
Satoru Hashimoto, Columbia University Press, Afterlives of Letters: The Transnational Origins of Modern Literature in China, Japan, and Korea.
Rosario Hubert, Northwestern University Press, Disoriented Disciplines: China, World Literature, and Latin America.
Liesl Yamaguchi, Fordham University Press, The Proper Tone: On the Colors of Vowels.
Past winners of the Helen Tartar Book Subvention Award
2021-2022:
Anna Ziajka Stanton, The Pennsylvania State University, The Worlding of Arabic Literature: Language, Affect, and the Ethics of Translatability.
Isabel Gómez, University of Massachusetts Boston, Cannibal Translation.
Tristram Wolff, Northwestern University, Against the Uprooted Word: Giving Language Time in Transatlantic Romanticism.
2020-2021:
Elizabeth Spragins, College of the Holy Cross, A Grammar of the Corpse: Necroepistemology in the Early Modern Mediterranean.
Joseph Cermatori, Skidmore College, Baroque Modernity: An Aesthetics of Theater.
Roanne Kantor, Stanford University, South Asian Writers, Latin American Literature and the Unexpected Journey to Global English.
2019-2020:
Kedar Kulkarni, Flame University, India, World Literature and the Question of Genre in Colonial India: Poetry, Drama, and Print Culture 1790-1890.
Julie-Françoise Tolliver, University of Houston, Tongue Ties: A Poetic Solidarity in Francophone Independence Literatures.
Duncan Yoon, New York University, Alluvial Dreams: Africa, China and the Aesthetics of Speculation.
2018-2019:
Rossen Djaglov, New York University, "From internationalism to Postcolonialism: Literature and Cinema between the Second and Third World".
Aliyah R. Khan, University of Michigan, "Far from Mecca: Globalizing the Muslim Caribbean".
Jonathon Repinecz, George Mason University, "Subversive Traditions: Reinventing the West African Epic".
2017-2018:
Lucy Alford, University of Chicago, "Forms of Poetics"
Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra, Penn State University, "The Dictator Novel: Writers and Politics in the Global South".
Hoda El-Shakry, Penn State University, "The Literary Qur'an: Narrative Ethics inthe Maghreb".
2016-2017:
Lindsey Green-Simms, American University, "Postcolonial Automobility: Car Culture in West Africa" (University of Minnesota Press, 2017).
Poulomi Saha, University of California, Berkeley, "Empire of Touch: Feminine Political Labor and the Fabrication of East Bengal, 1905-2015".
Tobias Warner, University of California, Davis, "Unwinding Translation: Decolonization, World Literature and the Politics of Language in Senegal".
2015-2016:
Sarah Dowling, University of Washington Bothell, "Remote Intimacies: Multilingualism and the Poetics of Personhood".
Cedric Tolliver, University of Houston, "Of Vagabonds and Fellow Travelers: African Diaspora Literary Culture and the Cultural Cold War".
Damon Young, University of California, Berkeley, "Making Sex Public: Cinema, Sex, and the Social".
2014-2015:
Jessie Labov, Ohio State University, "Transatlantic Central Europe: Contesting Geography and Redefining Culture Beyond the Nation" (CEU Press, 2016).
2013-2014:
Erika Boekeler, Northeastern University, "Playful Letters: The Dramatization of the Alphabet in the Renaissance" (University of Iowa Press, 2017).
Nathaniel Greenberg, Northern Michigan University, "The Aesthetic of Revolution in the Film and Literature of Naguib Mahfouz (1952-1967)", (Lexington Books, 2014).