Prof. Christine Bold, School of English and Theatre Studies, has received major academic awards and rave reviews for her book The Frontier Club: Popular Westerns and Cultural Power, 1880-1924.
At the Western Literature Association conference Nov. 7, she received the Thomas J. Lyon Book Award in Western American Literary and Cultural Studies. The annual award recognizes influential work and research in the field.
In October, Bold was presented with the 2014 Robert K. Martin Prize from the Canadian Association for American Studies. And CHOICE magazine, a review publication of the Association of College and Research Libraries, named The Frontier Club an “Outstanding Academic Title” of 2013.
One member of the Lyon book award committee wrote: “This is an incredibly important book. It rests on extensive archival research that forces a serious look at issues of race and gender, but most significantly at issues of class, which so often get overlooked in discussions of the West and of the Western. Bold draws clear and compelling connections between history and fiction, capitalism and aesthetics, and demonstrates the centrality of African Americans and women in the shaping of the vision of the popular Western as a white man’s genre.”
A U of G professor since 1989, Bold’s earlier publications include Selling the Wild West: Popular Western Fiction; Writers, Plumbers, and Anarchists: The WPA Writers’ Project in Massachusetts; The WPA Guides: Mapping America; and her edited volume in the Oxford History of Popular Print Culture, U.S. Popular Print Culture, 1860-1920.