Ana Stevenson has been named winner of the 35th annual Covert Award in Mass Communication History. A postdoctoral research fellow in the International Studies Group at the University of the Free State, South Africa, Stevenson won for “Imagining Women’s Suffrage: Frontier Landscapes and the Transnational Print Culture of Australia, New Zealand, and the United States,” Pacific Historical Review, 87, no. 4 (2018): 638–666.

The History Division will present the $500 award to Stevenson on Aug. 6 during its award gala at the annual AEJMC convention in Toronto.

Stevenson’s article was selected from 18 articles nominated. Her work joins a growing body of literature in both mass communications and history that examines cultural dissemination across national borders. It was impressive to see work that drew from suffrage print cultures of three different countries. Stevenson showed how constructed language advocating for women’s suffrage, in particular rhetoric that made ties to geography, the frontier, and settler narratives, was exchanged via transnational connections. Her reporting out of the archives was persuasive, as was her attention to how these narratives advantaged women of European heritage and excluded indigenous peoples.

The award, endowed by the late Catherine Covert, a professor of public communications at Syracuse University and former head of the AEJMC History Division, goes to the article or chapter in an edited collection that represents the year’s best essay in mass communication history. 

The Covert Committee includes some long-time members, the current and past heads of the History Division, and previous winners of the award. Committee members this year were: Erika Pribanic-Smith, University of Texas at Arlington; Douglas O. Cumming, Washington and Lee University; Richard B. Kielbowicz, University of Washington; Nancy Roberts, State University of New York at Albany; and Sheila Webb, Committee Chair, Western Washington University.