2021 Winner - Craig Griffiths
The Ambivalence of Gay Liberation: Male Homosexual Politics in 1970s West Germany (Oxford University Press) by Craig Griffiths has been awarded the Waterloo Centre for German Studies Book Prize for first books published in 2021.
The prize consists of a cash award of CAD $3,000 and an invitation to speak at the 2023 conference of German Studies Canada, the association of German studies scholars in Canada.
2021 Shortlist
Phil Alexander. Sounding Jewish in Berlin: Klezmer Music and the Contemporary City. (Oxford University Press)
Offers a fresh perspective on klezmer music in Germany that moves away from the previously dominant themes of guilt, appropriation, and Jewish absence (Oxford University Press).
Jeremy Best. Heavenly Fatherland: German Missionary Culture and Globalization in the Age of Empire. (University of Toronto Press)
Missionaries’ ideas about race and colonialism influenced ordinary Germans’ experience of globalization (University of Toronto Press).
Craig Griffiths. The Ambivalence of Gay Liberation: Male Homosexual Politics in 1970s West Germany. (Oxford University Press)
Looks past the mythology of gay pride to arrive at a more complex understanding of this key period in queer history (Oxford University Press).
S.E. Jackson. The Problem of the Actress in Modern German Theater and Thought. (Camden House)
Reconstructs the constitutive role that German actresses played on and off the stage in shaping not only modernist theater aesthetics and performance practices, but also influential strains of modern thought (Camden House).
Andrea Meyertholen. The Myth of Abstraction: The Hidden Origins of Abstract Art in German Literature. (Camden House)
This book features the work of three canonical nineteenth-century authors - Heinrich von Kleist, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Gottfried Keller who imagine, theorize, and describe abstract art (Camden House).
Brandon Woolf. Institutional Theatrics: Performing Arts Policy in Post-Wall Berlin. (Northwestern University Press)
In a city struggling to determine just how neoliberal it can afford to be, what kinds of performing arts practices and institutions are necessary—and why? (Northwestern University Press).