SASA 2016 Competition Winners Announced

Adam Matthew are delighted to announce that the winners of the first SASA Adam Matthew Digital Essay Competition are Hannah-Rose Murray, from the University of Nottingham, and Laura Harrison, from the University of Edinburgh.

Representatives from Adam Matthew attended the Scottish Association for the Study of America (SASA) 2016 Conference, which brings together academics studying all matters of Americana, at mostly Scottish institutions, to share ideas, papers and network with colleagues.

The conference is also where the winners of the Adam Matthew Digital Essay Competition were announced. Applicants were invited to submit essays between 3000 and 5000 words that related to a topic covered by any one of Adam Matthew’s North American collections. The prize money was divided between two papers due to the high calibre of applications this year.

Judges from the Executive Committee for SASA awarded First Prize to Hannah-Rose Murray from the University of Nottingham for her essay titled ‘”He Did Not Know Why They Called Him Tom”: The African American Fight Against British Racism 1845-1895’. The paper covered journeys of African Americans in the nineteenth century as they travelled throughout Europe campaigning for abolition. Hannah-Rose has also been granted one year’s access to American History, 1493-1945, an Adam Matthew collection of digital primary sources from the outstanding Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History in New York.

The Runner-Up prize was awarded to Laura Harrison from the University of Edinburgh for her essay ‘Delusions of Grandeur: The Declaration of Independence, Declaration of Arbroath and the Power of Semantics’, in which Laura discussed the origins and varied use of terminology when discussing these well-known historical events in academia over the years.

Adam Matthew congratulates both winners on their successful entries.