Dr Sarah Longair (Associate Professor in the History of Empire) has been named one of the 2024 winners of the prestigious National Teaching Fellowship and Collaborative Award for Teaching Excellence (CATE)!

You can read more about Sarah’s research-led, interdisciplinary teaching here.

We are very pleased to share the news that Owen Clayton’s book Vagabonds, Tramps, and Hobos: The Literature and Culture of U.S. Transiency 1890–1940 (Cambridge University Press, 2023) has won the esteemed BAAS (British Association for American Studies) book prize this year.

The most enduring version of the hobo that has come down from the so-called ‘Golden Age of Tramping’ (1890s to 1940s) is an American cultural icon, signifying freedom from restraint and rebellion to the established order while reinforcing conservative messages about American exceptionalism, individualism, race, and gender. Vagabonds, Tramps, and Hobos shows that this ‘pioneer hobo’ image is a misrepresentation by looking at works created by transient artists and thinkers, including travel literature, fiction, memoir, early feminist writing, poetry, sociology, political journalism, satire, and music. This book explores the diversity of meanings that accrue around ‘the hobo’ and ‘the tramp’. It is the first analysis to frame transiency within a nineteenth-century literary tradition of the vagabond, a figure who attempts to travel without money. This book provide new ways for scholars to think about the activity and representation of US transiency.

To quote the BAAS book prize committee: 

This excellent book explores the roots of the idea of “the Hobo” in American society and literature and offers a compelling argument for the uniquely “Americanness” of the idea. By focusing on the period before some of the better-known figures/works (Kerouac, Thelma and Louise, etc) it puts them in a larger conversation around questions of labour, migration (or movement more generally), and identity. 

Tracing the evolution of the idea and highlighting distinctions between “vagrants,” “tramps,” and “hobos,” the book offers a nuanced framework for exploring the continued evolution of these ideas in later works. The range of sources and perspectives (memoirs, cartoons, newspapers, music, literature, academia) add richness and depth, showcasing the strengths of American Studies as a discipline.

You can order the book on the Cambridge University Press website here (LINK).