The Student Paper Award is presented to the outstanding scholarly essay read at the annual conference of the SFRA by a student.

[*The SFRA award season begins in June of the year of record; awards are bestowed during the annual conference the following year.]

2017  Francis Gene-Rowe, “You Are The Hero: Stephen Mooney’s The Cursory Epic”
Honorary Mention: Brittany Roberts, “ 'The Present Doesn’t Exist': Music, Animation, and the Rupture of Cultural Memory in Vladimir Tarasov’s The Passage”

2016  Dagmar Van Engen, "The Interspecies Erotic: Sex and the Nonhuman in Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis Trilogy"

2015  W. Andrew Shepherd, "'What is and What Should Never Be’: Paracosmic Utopianism in Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World"

2014  Michael Jarvis, "'Wherever you go, there you are': Postmodern Pastiche and Oppositional Rhetoric in The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension"

2013  W. Andrew Shephard, "Beyond the Wide World's End: Themes of Cosmopolitanism in Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination"

2012  Florian Bast, "Fantastic Voices: Octavia Butler's First-Person Narrators and 'The Evening and the Morning and the Night'"

2011  Bradley Fest, "Tales of Archival Crisis: Stephenson’s Reimagining of the Post-Apocalyptic Frontier"

2010  Andrew Ferguson, "Such Delight in Bloody Slaughter: R. A. Lafferty and the Dismemberment of the Body Grotesque"

2009  David Higgins, "The Imperial Unconscious: Samuel R. Delany's The Fall of the Towers"

2007  Joseph Brown, "Heinlein and the Cold War: Epistemology and Politics in The Puppet Masters and Double Star"

2006  Linda Wight, "Magic, Art, Religion, Science: Blurring the Boundaries of Science and Science Fiction in Marge Piercy's Cyborgian Narrative"

2005  Rebecca Janicker, "New England Narratives: Space and Place in the Narratives of H. P. Lovecraft"

2004  Melissa Colleen Stevenson, "Single Cyborg Seeking Same: The Post-Human and the Problem of Loneliness"

2003  Sarah Canfield Fuller, "Speculating about Gendered Evolution: Bram Stoker'sWhite Worm and the Horror of Sexual Selection"

2002  Wendy Pearson, "Homotopia, or What's Behind a Prefix?"

2001  Eric Drown and Sha LaBare (tie), Drown for "Riding the Cosmic Express in the Age of Mass Production: Independent Inventors as Pulp Heroes in American SF, 1926–1939," and LaBare for "Outline for a Mode Manifesto: Science Fiction, Transhumanism, and Technoscience"

2000  Sonja Fritzsche, "Out of the Western Box: Rethinking Popular Cultural Categories from the Perspective of East German Science Fiction"

1999  Shelley Rodrigo Blanchard, " 'Resistance is Futile,' We Are Already Assimilated: Cyborging, Cyborg Societies, Cyborgs, and The Matrix"