2018 Wilson Prize Winners

2018 Wilson Prize Winners

Once again, it was a treat to reveal the Wilson Book Prize and the Viv Nelles Essay Prize winners at the CHA’s Award Ceremony. Thank you to all the publishers and students for sending in your wonderful books, papers, articles, etc. If you want more information about our nominees, please refer to the blog post we published a few weeks ago.

For those of you that were unable to attend yesterday’s ceremony in Vancouver, here are our winners:

The winner of the 2018 Viv Nelles Essay Prize is Mack Penner, a PhD student at McMaster University, for a paper titled: “‘Towards Spontaneous Order’: Tom Flanagan, Friedrich Hayek, and Neo-Austrianism on the Canadian Prairies.” Penner’s paper analyses Tom Flanagan’s intellectual development in the context of a transnational twentieth century process whereby the economic tenets of classical liberalism were

reexamined and reformulated. Mack walks away with $1,000 and a plaque commemorating his achievement will be displayed at the Wilson Institute. This is the first time a McMaster student wins this award. Well done Mack and Cody and best of luck with your studies!

And now … the Wilson Book Prize. Last year’s winner was Kristine Alexander’s amazing Guiding Modern Girls: Girlhood, Empire, and Internationalism in the 1920s and 1930s. And like last year, we asked our Wilson associates to weigh in on this impossibly difficult decision. We asked them to tell us, in a short paragraph, which one they believe should be considered for the award. This year’s competition was VERY close with Allan Greer’s Property and Dispossession: Natives, Empires, and Land in Early Modern North America and Allan Downey’s The Creator’s Game: Lacrosse, Identity, and Indigenous Nationhood finishing neck and neck. Both books received some extremely positive feedback for their ground-breaking and transnational approaches. And the winner is … Allan Greer’s Property and Dispossession: Natives, Empires, and Land in Early Modern North America, published by Cambridge University Press, by a single vote! Our closest competition to date. This is the first time that Cambridge University Press wins this award. CUP walks away with $10,000 that will help fund the publication of new, creative, and accessible Canadian history.

Once again, a massive thank you to all the nominees. Ruth Bleasdale (Rough Work: Labourers on the Public Works of British North America and Canada, 1841–1882), Carl Brisson et Camil Girard (Reconnaissance et exclusion des peuples autochtones au Québec. Du Traité d’alliance de 1603 à nos jours), Allan Downey (The Creator’s Game: Lacrosse, Identity, and Indigenous Nationhood), Allan Greer (Property and Dispossession: Natives, Empires, and Land in Early Modern North America), Rhonda Hinther (Perogies and Politics: Canada’s Ukrainian Left, 1891-1991), and Douglas Hunter (Beardmore: The Viking Hoax that Rewrote History): you have all produced some amazing work, forcing us all to rethink our history. Each book received very positive feedback from our associates and we all look forward to your next publications. We do not doubt that we’ll see your names on our shortlist once again!

Looking forward to next year:

Graduate Students: if you want your paper to be nominated for the $1,000 Viv Nelles Essay Prize contact Maxime Dagenais at wilsonch@mcmaster.ca

Publishers: if you want your book(s) to be nominated for the $10,000 Wilson Book Prize, send them to:


Wilson Institute for Canadian History
L.R. Wilson Hall Room 2802
McMaster University
1280 Main Street West
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada L8S 4L9