Foundations of Political Theory Section Award Recipients
More on the Foundations of Political Theory section
Best Paper Award
David Easton Award
First Book Award
Okin-Young Award in Feminist Political Theory
Best Paper Award
The Best Paper Award is given for the best paper presented on a foundations panel at the previous year’s APSA Annual Meeting.
| 2025 | Anna Terwiel, Trinity College “The power of new rights: extreme heat, the right to comfort, and the futures of abolition democracy.” |
| 2025 | Honorable Mention David Suell, University of Michigan “Untimely Continuities: Nyerere and Cabral on Politicizing History for Socialist Strategy.” |
| 2024 | Sheharyar Imran, Johns Hopkins University “Wastelanding and the Colonial Ecology of Racial Capitalism: An Indo-Atlantic Perspective.” |
| 2024 | Jess Feldman, Brown University “Hannah Arendt: General Strike Theorist?” |
| 2023 | Anna Jurkevics, The University of British Columbia |
| 2020 | Murad Idris, University of Virginia |
| 2019 | Cigdem Cidam, Union College “Rousseau’s Disastrous Utopias? On the Interchangeability of Political Theory, Pedagogy and Art.” |
| 2018 | Sophie Smith, Oxford University “Okin, Rawls, and the ‘Quest for Legitimacy’.” |
| 2017 | Zach Reyna, Johns Hopkins University “Bovine Bellow and Aquiline Vision: Aquinas’ Ecological Approach to Law & Politics” |
| 2016 | Josh Simon, Columbia University “Jose Marti’s Immanent Critique of American Imperialism” |
| 2015 | Alex Gourevitch, Brown University “Quitting Work But Not the Job: Liberty and the Right to Strike.” |
| 2014 | Brandon Terry, Yale University “Rawls, Race, and Critique: Engaging with Charles Mills’ The Racial Contract” |
| 2014 | Eline Severs, Vrije Universiteit Brussel “Determining the Quality of Women’s Substantive Representation: A Study of Muslem Women’s Voice and Influence in the Belgian Headscarf Debate.” |
| 2012 | Jane Gordon, Temple University Theorizing Contemporary Practices of Slavery |
| 2011 | Lisa Blaydes, Stanford University “How Does Islamist Local Governance Affect the Lives of Women?: A Comparative Study of Two Cairo Neighborhoods” |
| 2011 | Farah Godrej, University of California, Riverside “Gandhi’s Body: Asceticism, Pain and Suffering in Environmental Political Discourse” |
| 2010 | Philip Michelbach, West Virginia University “Renewing Democratic Authority: Hamlet’s Politics with (and against) Carl Schmitt” |
| 2010 | Andrew Poe, University of California, San Diego “Renewing Democratic Authority: Hamlet’s Politics with (and against) Carl Schmitt” |
| 2006 | Patchen Markell, University of Chicago “The Insufficiency of Non-Domniation” |
| 2005 | Samuel Chambers, University of Wales Swansea “The Alterirty of the Present: Reading Sexuality in Six Feet Under” |
| 2003 | Leigh Jenco, University of Chicago “Representing a Noble Heart: Thoreau’s Critique of Democracy” |
| 2002 | Lawrie Balfour, University of Virginia “The Argument of John Brown” |
| 2002 | Roy Tsao, Georgetown University “Arendt Against Athens: Rereading the Human Condition” |
| 2001 | Jennifer Pitts, Yale University “Legislator of the World? A Rereading of Bentham on India.” |
| 1999 | Albert Dzur, Univerity of Utah “Comprehensive Liberal Politics and the Fact of Pluralism” |
| 1998 | Kennan Ferguson, University of Hawaii “Communities of Meaning: Toward a Kantian Non-Universal Judgment” |
| 1997 | Elizabeth Wingrove, University of Michigan “Republican Romance” |
David Easton Award
The David Easton Award is given for a book that broadens the horizons of contemporary political science by engaging issues of philosophical significance in political life through any of a variety of approaches in the social sciences and humanities.
| 2025 | Banu Bargu, University of California, Santa Cruz Disembodiment. Oxford University Press, 2024. |
| 2025 | Melissa Schwartzberg, New York University Jack Knight, Duke University Democratic Deals: A Defense of Political Bargaining. Harvard University Press, 2024. |
| 2024 | Melvin Rogers, Brown University The Darkened Light of Faith: Race, Democracy, and Freedom in African American Political Thought (Princeton University Press, 2023). |
| 2023 | Tommie Shelby, Harvard University The Idea of Prison Abolition |
| 2023 | William E. Connolly, Johns Hopkins University Resounding Events |
| 2022 | Ellen Hunt Botting, University of Notre Dame Artificial Life After Frankenstein. University of Pennsylvania, 2021. |
| 2021 | Cressida Heyes, University of Alberta Anaesthetics of Experience. Duke University Press, 2020. |
| 2021 | Honorable Mention Mahmood Mandani Neither Settler Nor Native. Harvard University Press, 2020. |
| 2020 | Murad Idris, University of Virginia |
| 2020 | Honorable Mention |
| 2019 | Jill Frank, Cornell University Poetic Justice: Rereading Plato’s Republic. University of Chicago Press, 2018. |
| 2018 | Clare Chambers, University of Cambridge Against Marriage: An Egalitarian Defense of the Marriage-Free State. Oxford University Press. 2017. |
| 2018 | Barbara Arneil, University of British Columbia Domestic Colonies: The Turn Inward to Colony. Oxford University Press. 2017. |
| 2017 | Margaret Kohn, The Death and Life of the Urban Commonwealth (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016 |
| 2016 | Patrick Wolfe, past university affiliations include: University of Melbourne, Victoria University and La Trobe University Traces of History: Elementary Structures of Race. Verso 2015 |
| 2015 | Michael Shapiro, University of Hawaii at Mānoa War Crimes, Atrocity, and Justice. Polity Press, 2015. |
| 2015 | Joan Cocks, Mount Holyoke College On Sovereignty and Other Political Delusions. Bloomsbury, 2014 |
| 2014 | Joseph Carens, University of Toronto The Ethics of Immigration. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013 |
| 2014 | Honorable Mention Philip Petit, Princeton University On the People’s Terms: A Republican Theory and Model of Democracy. Cambridge University Press, 2012 |
| 2013 | Tracy B Strong, UCSD Distinguished Professor emeritus / Professor. University of Southampton (UK) Politics without Vision: ‘Thinking without a Banister’ in the Twentieth Century (Chicago) |
| 2012 | Bonnie Honig, Northwestern University Emergency Politics: Paradox, Law, Democracy (Princeton University Press, 2011) |
| 2012 | Wendy Brown, University of California, Berkeley Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (Zone Books, 2010) |
| 2011 | Joseph Schwartz, Temple University The Future of Democratic Equality: Rebuilding Social Solidarity in a Fragmented America |
| 2010 | George Shulman, New York University American Prophecy: Race and Redemption in American Political Culture |
| 2009 | Carol Gould, George Mason University Globalizing Democracy (Cambridge University Press) |
| 2007 | Quentin Skinner Visions of Politics (Three Volumes), Cambridge University Press, 2002 |
| 2006 | Henry Richardson, Georgetown University Democratic Autonomy: Public Reasoning about the Ends of Policy (Oxford University Press, 2003) |
| 2005 | Ira Katznelson, Columbia University “Desolation and Enlightenment. Political Knowledge After Total War, Totalitarianism and the Holocaust” (Columbia University Press, 2003) |
| 2004 | Scott Althaus, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign Collective Preferences in Democratic Politics: Opinion Surveys and the Will of the People (Cambridge University Press, 2003) |
| 2003 | Sheldon Wolin Tocqueville Between Two Worlds: The Making of Political and Theoretical Life. (Princeton University Press 2001) |
| 2002 | Nancy Rosenblum, Harvard University Membership and Morals: The Personal Uses of Pluralism in America |
| 2001 | Rogers Smith, University of Pennsylvania Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History |
| 2000 | Jennifer Hochschild, Harvard University Facing the American Dream: Race, Class, and the Soul of the Nation (Princeton University Press, 1999) |
| 1999 | David Laitin, Stanford University Identity in Formation: The Russian-Speaking Populations in the Near Abroad (Cornell University Press, 1998) |
| 1998 | Robert Putnam, Harvard University Making Democracy Work (Princeton University Press, 1993) |
| 1997 | Jürgen Habermas Between Facts and Norms (MIT Press 1996) |
First Book Award
The First Book Award is given for a first book by a scholar in the early stages of his or her career in the area of political theory or political philosophy.
| 2025 | Lowry Pressly, Stanford University The Right to Oblivion. Harvard University Press, 2024. |
| 2025 | Honorable Mention Rachel Brown, Washington University in St. Louis Unsettled Labors. Duke University Press, 2024. |
| 2024 | David Myer Temin, University of Michigan Remapping Sovereignty: Decolonization and Self-Determination in North American Indigenous Political Thought. University of Chicago Press, 2023. |
| 2024 | Tejas Parasher, University of California, Los Angeles Radical Democracy in Modern Indian Political Thought. Cambridge University Press, 2023. |
| 2023 | Stefan Eich, Georgetown University The Currency of Politics. Princeton University Press. |
| 2023 | Honorable Mention Irit Katz, University of Cambridge The Common Camp. University of Minnesota Press. |
| 2022 | Erin Pineda, Smith College Seeing Like an Activist: Civil Disobedience and the Civil Rights Movement. Oxford, 2021. |
| 2022 | Zeynep Pamuk, University of San Diego Politics and Expertise: How to Use Science in a Democratic Society. Princeton, 2021. |
| 2021 | Kyong-Min Son, University of Delaware The Eclipse of the Demos: The Cold War and the Crisis of Democracy before Neoliberalism. University Press of Kansas, 2020. |
| 2021 | Honorable Mention Sara Rushing, Montana State University The Virtues of Vulnerability. Oxford University Press, 2020. |
| 2020 | Adom Getachew, University of Chicago |
| 2020 | Honorable Mention |
| 2019 | Yves Winter, McGill University Machiavelli and the Orders of Violence. Cambridge University Press, 2018. |
| 2018 | Sina Jo Kramer, Loyola Marymount University Excluded Within: The (Un)Intelligibility of Radical Political Actors. Oxford University Press. 2017. |
| 2018 | Siavash Saffari, Seoul National University Beyond Shariati: Modernity, Cosmopolitanism, and Islam in Iranian Political Thought. Cambridge University Press. 2017. |
| 2018 | Honorable Mention Angelica Bernal, Universityof Massachusetts, Amherst Beyond Origins: Rethinking Founding in a Time of Constitutional Democracy. Oxford University Press, 2017. |
| 2017 | Joseph J. Fischel Sex and Harm in the Age of Consent |
| 2016 | Neil Roberts, Williams College Freedom as Marronage. University of Chicago Press |
| 2016 | Shalini Satkunanandan, University of California, Davis Extraordinary Responsibility: Politics Beyond the Moral Calculus. Cambridge University Press |
| 2015 | Banu Bargu, New School for Social Research Starve and Immolate: The Politics of Human Weapons. Columbia University Press, 2014. |
| 2014 | Christopher Lebron, Yale University The Color of Our Shame: Race and Justice in Our Time (Oxford University Press) |
| 2013 | Jeffrey Church |
| 2012 | Stephen Marshall, University of Texas, Austin The City on the Hill from Below: The Crisis of Prophetic Black Politics (Temple University Press, 2011) |
| 2010 | Jeffrey Green, University of Pennsylvania |
| 2010 | Honorable Mention Danielle Celermajer, University of Sydney The Sins of the Nation an dthe Ritual of Apologies (Cambridge University Press, 2009) |
| 2010 | Honorable Mention Mark B. Brown, California State University, Sacramento Science in Democracy: Expertise, Institutions, and Representation (MIT Press, 2009) |
| 2009 | Samantha Frost, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign Lessons from a Materialist Thinker (Stanford University Press) |
| 2007 | Bryan Garsten, Yale Univesrity Saving Persuasion: A Defense of Rhetoric and Judgment (Harvard University Press, 2006) |
| 2006 | Elisabeth Ellis, Texas A&M University Kant’s Politics: Provisional Theory for an Uncertain World (Yale University Press, 2005) |
| 2006 | Jennifer Pitts, Princeton University A Turn to Empire: Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France (Princeton University Press, 2005) |
| 2005 | Corey Robin, CUNY Brooklyn Fear: The History of a Political Idea (Oxford University Press, 2004). |
| 2004 | Alan Keenan, Bryn Mawr College Democracy in Question: Democratic Openness in a Time of Political Closure (Stanford University Press, 2003) |
| 2004 | Patchen Markell, University of Chicago Bound by Recognition (Princeton University Press, 2003) |
| 2003 | Laura Janara, University of British Columbia Democracy Growing Up: Authority, Autonomy and Passion in Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (SUNY Press) |
| 2002 | Ayelet Shachar, University of Toronto Multicultural Jurisdictions: Cultural Differences and Women’s Rights |
| 2002 | Honorable Mention Dan Engster, University of Texas, San Antonio Multicultural Jurisdictions: Cultural Differences and Women’s Rights (Cambridge University Press, 2001) |
| 2001 | Sara Monoson, Northwestern University Plato’s Democratic Entanglements |
| 2000 | Alan Patten, McGill University Hegel’s Idea of Freedom (Oxford University Press, 1999) |
| 1999 | C. Thompson, Ashland University John Adams and the Spirit of Liberty (University of Kansas Press, 1998) |
| 1999 | Melissa Williams, University of Toronto Voice, Trust, and Memory (Princeton University Press, 1998) |
| 1998 | James Bailey, Princeton University Utilitarianism, Institutions, and Justice (Oxford University Press, 1997) |
| 1997 | Simone Chambers, University of Toronto Reasonable Democracy (Cornell University Press, 1996) |
| 1994 | Bonnie Honig, Harvard University Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics (Cornell University Press, 1993) |
| 1993 | Richard Sinopoli, University of California, Davis The Foundations of American Citizenship and Civic Virtue (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992) |
| 1992 | Alan Houston, University of California, San Diego Algernon Sydney and the Republican Heritage in England and America (Princeton University Press, 1991) |
| 1991 | Stephen Leonard, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill Political Theory in Political Practice (Princeton University Press, 1990) |
| 1990 | William Corlett, Bates College Community Without Unity: A Politics of Deridian Extravagance (Duke University Press) |
The Okin-Young Award in Feminist Political Theory
The Okin-Young Award in Feminist Political Theory, co-sponsored by Women and Politics, Foundations of Political Theory, and the Women’s Caucus for Political Science, commemorates the scholarly, mentoring, and professional contributions of Susan Moller Okin and Iris Marion Young to the development of the field of feminist political theory. This annual award recognizes the best paper on feminist political theory published in an English language academic journal during the previous calendar year.
| 2025 | Rose Owen, The New School for Social Research “‘A New Kind of Death’, Rape, Sex, and Pornography as Violence in Andrea Dworkin’s Thought.” Political Theory 52(5): 754-781. 2024. |
| 2024 | Elena Gambino, Rutgers University “Red Roots of Solidarity: Paula Gunn Allen and the Queer Audiences of Intellectual Sovereignty.” Journal of Women in Culture and Society 48(2): 635–658. 2023. |
| 2024 | Robyn Marasco, CUNY Graduate Center and Hunter College “The Real Possibility of Physical Killing: A Feminist Critique of Carl Schmitt.” American Journal of Political Science 67(4): 1067-1079. 2023. |
| 2023 | Danielle Hanley, Clark University “Choreographing Affective Solidarity: The Choral Politics of Responding to Loss.” Theory and Event, 2022. |
| 2023 | Katrina Forrester, Harvard University “Feminist Demands and the Problem of Housework.” American Political Science Review, 2022. |
| 2022 | Kimberly Hutchings, Queen Mary University of London “Women Thinkers and the Canon of International Thought: Recovery, Rejection, and Reconstitution ”American Political Science Review, May 2021. |
| 2022 | Patricia Owens, University of Oxford |
| 2021 | Dr. Jemima Repo, Newcastle University “Feminist Commodity Activism: The New Political Economy of Feminist Protest.” |
| 2020 | Menaka Philips, Tulane University |
| 2019 | Heath Fogg Davis, Temple University “Why the ‘transgender’ bathroom controversy should make us rethink sex-segregated public bathrooms.” Politics, Groups, and Identities 6(2): 199-216. |
| 2019 | Honorable Mention Ashleigh Campi, Loyola Marymount University “The Unstable Alliance for School Choice: Social Movements and American Neoliberalism.” Polity 50(3): 398-427. |
| 2018 | Nina Hagel, Bates College Alternative Authenticities: Thinking Transgender Without Essence. Theory & Event. 20(3): 599–628. 2017. |
| 2017 | Lorna Bracewell, University of Nebraska at Kearney “Beyond Barnard: Liberalism, Antipornography Feminism, and the Sex Wars.” Signs |
| 2016 | Jakeet Singh, Illinois State University “Religious Agency and the Limits of Intersectionality.” Hypatia, Volume 30, Issue 4, pages 657–674, Fall 2015 |
| 2015 | Shatema Threadcraft, Dartmouth College “Intimate Injustice, Political Obligation, and the Dark Ghetto.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 39(3) Spring 2014: 735-760 |
| 2014 | Eileen Botting, University of Notre Dame “Making an American Feminist Icon: Mary Wollstonecraft’s Reception in U.S. Newspapers, 1800-1869” (History of Political Thought, 2013) |
| 2013 | Lori Marso, Union College “Simone de Beauvoir and Hannah Arendt: Judgments in Dark Times” Political Theory 40(2): 165-193 |
| 2012 | Bonnie Honig, Northwestern University Ismene’s Forced Choice: Sacrifice and Sorority in Sophocles’ Antigone (Arethusa. 44(1)) |
| 2011 | Jennifer Einspahr, Kalamazoo College “Structural Domination and Structural Freedom: A Feminist Perspective,” |
| 2010 | Ann Towns, University of Delaware “The Status of Women as a Standard of “Civilization” |
| 2009 | Kathy Ferguson, University of Hawaii “Discourses of Dan” |