The Sidney Prize is awarded each month to an outstanding piece of journalism that appeared in the previous month. Winners are chosen by a panel of journalists including the editor of Overland, Tara June Winch. To be considered for the next round of the prize, enter your piece here before midnight Monday 2 October. You can also sign up to become a subscriber to Overland at the discounted rate, which will allow you to enter the competition.
New York Times columnist David Brooks has been giving out the Sidney awards since 2004, honoring the year’s best long-form essays in politics and culture. His 2020 selections include a remarkable essay by Helen Andrews, who describes how she was subjected to online viciousness after appearing on a conservative panel about gay marriage with her ex-boyfriend. She argues that such sensitivity creates a “vindictive protectiveness” that is harmful to students and keeps them unprepared for the real world.
Alumnus Sidney Iwanter’s curiosity and his will to pass on knowledge from one generation to the next led him to secretly record lectures given by professor of history Harvey Goldberg while he was a student at UW-Madison. Iwanter then generously donated these “bootlegs” to the university and they can be heard on the Goldberg Center website. The prize is dedicated to the memory of Iwanter and reflects his own passion for the legacy of scholarship.
Distinguished journalist, author and scholar Edward Jones-Imhotep has won the 2024 Sidney M. Edelstein Prize from the Society for the History of Technology for his book A Dam for Africa: Akosombo Stories from Ghana (Indiana University Press, 2022). This is one of the most prestigious prizes in the field of the history of science and technology.
Art history major Sophia Jactel won the 2019 Sidney Thomas prize for her paper “Domesticity and Diversions: Josef Israels’ The Smoker as a Symbol of Peasant Culture and the Role of the Home in Nineteenth-Century Holland.” Sophia joins fellow art historians in the Department of Humanities who have won this coveted award, which is named for Professor Sidney Thomas who served on the faculty from 1961 to 1985.
This is the second time Jones-Imhotep has won this prestigious prize, which is awarded each year for a book that makes a significant contribution to the field of the history of technology and that was published within the past three years. In addition to illuminating an important period of history, the book contributes to our understanding of the evolution of global governance in general and in the development of international organizations in particular. He is only the second person from a Canadian institution to receive this prize in its 50-year history. He teaches in the Department of History, Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies, at York University. He is currently working on a third book on the evolution of global governance.