Thomas Cryer wins Journalism History's Essay Prize

The RAI congratulates, Fellow, Tom Cryer on winning Journalism History's 2025-2026 Essay Prize. 

He was awarded the prize for his academic essay, 'Independence, Incarcerated: Prison Newspapers, Abolitionist Critique and Commemorating the Bicentennial Behind Bars.' The short article, which will be published in Journalism History's journal, examines how 1970s US prison newspapers leveraged the Declaration of Independence to radically contest America’s promises of liberty and equality. The judges of the prize described the essay proposal as building an 'incredibly strong' and 'fascinating argument about the concept of freedom and its role in American national memory, and who is allowed to participate in that memory-making process.'

Thomas Cryer is a historian of the twentieth-century United States specialising in the intersecting histories of education, ideas, memory, and race. His research investigates how activist-intellectuals reshaped twentieth-century American universities, reconfiguring academic disciplines (including history) to demand social change, both within and beyond campus spaces. His research has appeared in journals including Modern American History, Modern Intellectual History and the Journal of American Studies. His article in the latter journal won both the 2025 Historians of the Twentieth-Century United States Early Career Article Prize and the 2025 Arthur Miller Institute Article Prize.