• Richard Beale Davis Prize for 2021
• Awarded to: Stacey Dearing

The prize committee of the Modern Language Association Forum on Early American Literature is pleased to name Stacey Dearing's "Remembering Dorothy May Bradford's Death and Reframing 'Depression' in Colonial New England" as the winner of the 2021 Richard Beale Davis Prize for the best essay published in volume 56 of Early American Literature (56, no. 1, 2021, pp. 75–104). Though the committee read many distinguished essays, Dearing's work stood out for its innovative research and capacious rethinking of the possibilities of colonial scholarship.

Dearing's essay revisits the death of Dorothy May Bradford, who drowned in Cape Cod after falling off the Mayflower in the winter of 1620. Though Bradford's death often appears as a footnote to the founding myth of Pilgrims landing at Plymouth Rock, Dearing shows that Bradford's death and the centuries of scholarship about it have always been an important historiographic object in their own right, forming an image of the prototypical Pilgrim woman as hobbled by mental anguish. Dearing carefully tracks the transmission of Bradford's story across archives of scholarship and cinema, showing how depressed women have stood as counterparts to settler men, and suggesting that our understanding of Puritan history has been shaped as much by narratives about women's mental health as by stories of colonial founding. The essay is a marvelous reconstruction of how historiographic traditions are shaped by deep-seated assumptions about gender and mental health. Yet it also offers a new possibility for understanding the colonial past, a "psychohistory" of mental health and its implication in historical knowledge (75). Ultimately, Dearing suggests scholarship should abandon speculative attempts "to solve the mystery of Bradford's death" and instead embrace a sense of historical actors as figures whose emotional complexity resists attempts at explanation. Such an [End Page 319] approach, Dearing urges, might help us see that "depression and suicide are a central part of the national origin story and deserve critical attention" (94). We believe that this essay, in addition to advancing knowledge about the social history of early Anglo-American settlement, participates in and enhances historiography more broadly by modeling more sensitive, self-conscious attunement toward the opacities and lacunae of other peoples' interiority, both in the past and beyond it. [End Page 320]

• 2021 年理查德·比尔·戴维斯奖
• 授予：史黛西·迪林

现代语言协会早期美国文学论坛评奖委员会很高兴将斯泰西·迪林的《纪念多萝西·梅·布拉德福德之死并重构新英格兰殖民地的‘抑郁’》评为 2021 年理查德·比尔·戴维斯最佳发表论文奖得主载于《早期美国文学》第 56 卷（56，第 1 期，2021 年，第 75-104 页）。尽管委员会阅读了许多杰出的论文，但迪林的作品因其创新性研究和对殖民学术可能性的广泛反思而脱颖而出。

迪林的文章回顾了多萝西·梅·布拉德福德的死亡，她从五月花号上坠落后在科德角溺水身亡1620 年冬天。虽然布拉德福德之死经常作为清教徒登陆普利茅斯岩的创始神话的脚注出现，但迪林表明，布拉德福德之死以及几个世纪以来有关它的学术研究本身一直是一个重要的史学对象，形成了典型的朝圣者妇女因精神痛苦而步履蹒跚的形象。迪林仔细追踪了布拉德福德的故事在学术和电影档案中的传播，展示了抑郁症女性与定居者男性的对应关系，并表明我们对清教徒历史的理解既受到有关女性心理健康的叙述的影响，也受到有关女性心理健康的故事的影响。殖民建国。这篇文章对关于性别和心理健康的根深蒂固的假设如何塑造史学传统进行了精彩的重构。然而，它也为理解殖民历史、心理健康的“心理史学”及其在历史知识中的含义提供了新的可能性（75）。最终，迪林建议学术界应该放弃“解决布拉德福德之死之谜”的推测性尝试，而应该接受历史演员作为情感复杂性难以解释的人物的感觉。这样一个 迪林建议学术界应该放弃“解开布拉德福德之死之谜”的推测性尝试，而应该接受历史演员作为人物的感觉，他们的情感复杂性难以解释。这样一个 迪林建议学术界应该放弃“解开布拉德福德之死之谜”的推测性尝试，而应该接受历史演员作为人物的感觉，他们的情感复杂性难以解释。这样一个迪林敦促，[第 319 页结束]的方法可能会帮助我们认识到“抑郁和自杀是民族起源故事的核心部分，值得高度关注”（94）。我们相信，这篇文章除了增进对早期英美定居点社会历史的了解之外，还通过对其他民族内心的不透明和缺陷建立更敏感、更自觉的协调模型，更广泛地参与和增强了史学编纂。过去及之后。[完第320页]