This year's Fulbright Prize in American Studies has been awarded to Markus Schwarz for his master thesis “good kid, m.AA.d City: Utopian and Dystopian Discourses in African-American Hip-Hop,” which was supervised by Prof. Alexandra Ganser-Blumenau at the University of Vienna. Markus was honored for his achievement on 28 October 2021 at the annual conference of the Austrian Association for American Studies (AAAS).

This award is based on an annual competition managed by the AAAS. The Fulbright Prize is a means of acknowledging the enduring importance of American studies and the role of innovative research by young academics in Austria in contributing to the fulfillment of the Fulbright Program’s mandate to promote mutual understanding between the peoples of Austria and the United States of America.

The purpose of this award is to recognize superior academic achievement in the field of American studies (Amerikanistik) in the broadest sense of the word and hence includes all relevant ancillary disciplines and departments at Austrian universities (e.g., comparative literature, history, political science, sociology, etc.). There are no specific topical or methodological limitations on submissions. For more information, see the AAAS's website.