DAAD/GSA Best Book and Article Prizes 2025

DAAD is proud to announce the winners of the 2025 DAAD/GSA Best Book and Article Prizes and honorable mentions awarded on September 26, 2025, at the 49th Annual Conference of the German Studies Association in Arlington, VA.

The winners are:

Dagmar Herzog (Graduate Center, City University of New York) is the winner of this year’s prize for the best book in History and Social Sciences published in 2024. Her book Question of Unworthy Life: Eugenics and Germany’s Twentieth Century was published by Princeton University Press. The Book Prize Committee was chaired by Kira Thurman (University of Michigan) and included Christopher Ewing (Purdue University) and Margaret B. Lewis (University of Tennessee at Martin).

Johanna Schuster-Craig (Independent Scholar) received an honorable mention for her book One Word Shapes a Nation: Integration Politics in Germany, also nominated in the category History and Social Sciences and published in 2024 by University of Toronto Press.

Wesley Lim (School of Literature, Languages and Linguistics, Australian National University) is the winner of this year’s prize for the best book in Literature and Cultural Studies published in 2024. His book Dancing with the Modernist City: Metropolitan Dance Texts around 1900 was published by University of Michigan Press. The Book Prize Committee was chaired by Olivia Landry (Virginia Commonwealth University) and included Benita Blessing (Oregon State University) and Sara Jackson (University of Massachusetts-Amherst).

Elizabeth J. Petcu (Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, University of Edinburgh) received an honorable mention for her book The Architectural Image and Early Modern Science: Wendel Dietterlin and the Rise of Empirical Investigation, also nominated in the category Literature and Cultural Studies and published in 2024 by Cambridge University Press.

Asif Rahamim (Dept. of Philosophy and Humanities, Freie Universität Berlin) was awarded this year’s prize for the best article in any discipline published in the German Studies Review in 2024. His article “Später: Objectless Eschatology and Radical Hope in the Poetry of Paul Celan” appeared in the GSR, Vol. 47 [No. 3], October 2024. The Article Prize Committee was chaired by Frank Biess (University of California, San Diego) and included Chunjie Zhang (University of California, Davis) and Jonas Rosenbrueck (Amherst College).

J. Andie Speed (Behavioral and Social Sciences Department, Western Colorado University) received an honorable mention for her article “On Sunlit Fields: The Swabian Children, Legal Personhood, and the Tyrolean Statthalterei’s Edict of 1867”, also nominated for best article and published in the GSR, Vol. 47 [No. 1], February 2024.

Congratulations to all winners and honorable mentions! DAAD is proud to sponsor these awards, which encourage and recognize scholarly excellence.