Stuart Schrader

At the 2015 American Studies Association Annual Meeting in Toronto last weekend, I was honored to receive Finalist mention (second place) for the Ralph Henry Gabriel Dissertation Prize, awarded annually by the Association. I am grateful to the prize committee, Professors Alyosha Goldstein, Lisa Hajjar, and Karen Shimakawa, for their recognition of my dissertation, "American Streets, Foreign Territory: How Counterinsurgent Police Waged War on Crime." As the ASA says, "The Ralph Henry Gabriel Dissertation Prize, established in 1974, has been awarded annually since 1987 by the Association for the best dissertation in American Studies." I would also like to congratulate the overall winner of the prize, Erin Durban-Albrecht, and my co-Finalist, Megan Black, a good friend and colleague at Harvard's Charles Warren Center.

For two years in a row, I have been recognized at the American Studies Association's award ceremony. Last year, I won the Gene Wise - Warren Susman Prize for the best paper presented by a graduate student at the annual meeting. I am deeply honored and grateful for these awards. I couldn't have done this work without the support of my committee, especially Nikhil Singh, or without a wide circle of friends and colleagues. The Acknowledgments in my dissertation run to nine pages.

This year at the Annual Meeting, I presented a paper on a panel sponsored by the American Studies Association's Critical Prison Studies Caucus, entitled "Carceral Globalizations I." (It was the first of a two-part series.) The other panelists were Marisol LeBron and Lila Sharif; Deb Cowen provided commentary. The purpose of the panel was to reflect on how the North American Free Trade Act (NAFTA) has entailed wide circulations of security and carceral practices across the Americas. Yet the three panelists all troubled the temporalities and spatialities implicit in the very idea of security logics attendant to NAFTA. The panel was great, and there was a robust discussion afterward. Originally, I had thought I would present on my research on the Cold War, but I ended up writing a paper that drew the genealogy back across the entirety of the 20th century. So the title of the paper, “Before Free Trade: The Cold War Circulation of Policing Expertise in the Americas,” is a little inaccurate. As I always do, I tried to emphasize historical continuities while balancing them against undeniable transformations. I have uploaded the paper to academia.edu, something I've never done before with a conference presentation. I happen to think it's pretty good, so please check it out.