Christian Bay Award

The Christian Bay Award recognizes the best paper presented on a critical political science panel at the previous year’s annual meeting of the American Political Science Association.

2023 Recipient: 
Bradley J. Macdonald
Paper Title: “Morris’ Utopian Matrix: Art, Socialism, and Political Action”

2023 Committee:
Katherine Young (chair), Joseph Peschek, Robert Kirsch

This year’s recipient of the Christian Bay Award is Bradley J. Macdonald for his paper “Morris’ Utopian Matrix: Art, Socialism, and Political Action” which recasts William Morris’ utopian aspirations with his practical aesthetics. By building what Macdonald calls a utopian Matrix, he theorizes a new way of understanding Morris that goes beyond previous analyses of Morris that either cast him as an “art-for-art’s-sake” romanticist on the one hand or assessing to what extent his socialism comported with Marxism on the other. Macdonald’s paper dialectically pushes past these poles and gives a material basis for Morris’aesthetic sensibilities and a lived socialism as well as a theorization of Morris that infuses aesthetics with an ecological politics. In other words, Macdonald’s paper presents a depth of argument for a critical environmental politics that harnesses the liberatory potential of art in the vision of a socialist practice and everyday life.

Past Recipients

2022: Nancy Sue Love, Appalachian State University
“Land and Song: Indigenous Reflections on Sovereign Community”

2021: Joanna Wuest, Princeton University
“The Impossibility of Liberation: Queer Political Thought Since the New Left”

2020: Gregory Koutnik, University of Pennsylvania
“Ecological Populism: Politics In Defense of Home.”

2019: Mark Major, Independent Scholar
“Why the South Prevailed: Civil Rights, Anticommunism, and the Origins of the ‘Liberal Media.’”

2018: Priscilla Yamin and Alison Gash, University of Oregon
“‘Illegalizing Families’: State Status and Deportability.”

2017: Timothy Weaver, University at Albany, SUNY
“A City of Citizens: Social Justice and Urban Social Citizenship.”

2016: Jocelyn Boryczka, Fairfield University
“An Anatomy of Sexism: The Colonized Vagina.”

Additional Recipients »

The Christian Bay Award will not be presented at next year’s APSA Conference (2024) due to the cancellation of CCPS’s participation in the 2023 conference. The award will, however, continue to be presented at future conferences.