The Boydston Essay Prize was established in 1995 by Jo Ann Boydston to honor the best essay or review published anywhere during the previous two years, the primary focus of which is the editing of a volume of works or documents.

• 2021 – Maria Benauer for her essay “At the Intersection of Sciences, Humanities and Technologies — A Review of the Edition Humboldt Digital” in RIDE 13 (2022)
• 2021 – Christopher Ohge for his essay “Melville Incomplete” in American Literary History 31, no. 1 (Spring 2019): 139-150.
• 2018 – Nicole Gray and Kenneth M. Price for their essay “The Letters in the Litter: Messy Boundaries and Other Conundrums in Editing Walt Whitman’s Correspondence,” Scholarly Editing 37 (2016), http://scholarlyediting.org/2016/essays/essay.grayprice.html.
• 2016 – Ann Gordon for her review essay “Getting History’s Words Right: Diaries of Emilie Davis” in The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 139 (2015): 197-216.
• 2014 – Alison Chapman for “Revolutionizing Elizabeth Barrett Browning: A Review of The Complete Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning” in Victorian Literature and Culture 39 [2011], 605-611.
• 2012 – Michael Dirda for his review essay “Messing About with ‘The Wind in the Willows,’” review of The Annotated Wind in the Willows, by Kenneth Grahame, edited by Annie Gauger, and The Wind in the Willows: An Annotated Edition, by Kenneth Grahame, edited by Seth Lerer, New York Review of Books 56.13 (13 August 2009), https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2009/08/13/messing-about-with-the-wind-in-the-willows/.
• 2009 – Ronald Broude for his article, “The Gilbert & Sullivan Critical Edition and the Full Scores that Never Were,” TEXTUAL CULTURES 3.2 (2008)
• 2007 – Raymond Stephanson for his essay, “Letters of Mr. Alexander Pope and the Curious Case of Modern Scholarship and the Vanishing Text,” Eighteenth-Century Life 31.1 (Winter 2007).
• 2005 – Tim William Machan, “The Piers Plowman Electronic Archive, Vol. 1: Corpus Christie College Oxford MS 201 (F), ed. Robert Adams, Hoyt N. Duggan, Eric Eliason, Ralph Hanna III, John Price-Wilkin, and Thorlac Turville-Petre; The Piers Plowman Electronic Archive, Vol. 2: Cambridge Trinity College MSB.15.17 (W), ed. Thorlac Turville-Petre and Hoyt Duggan. SEENET, University of Michigan Press, 1999 and 2000,” TEXT 16 (2006): 400-405
• 2005 – Paul Eggert, “These Post-Philological Days…. D.C. Greetham. Theories of the Text. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999,” TEXT 15 (2003): 323-336.
• 2003 – Dayton W. Haskin for “No Edition Is an Island: The Place of Nineteenth-Century American Editions within the History of Editing Donne’s Poems,” TEXT 14 (2002): 169-207.
• 2001 – Peter Shillingsburg for the review of various works published in The Academy Editions of Australian Literature series and the Colonial Texts Series, which appeared in TEXT 12 (1999): 264-273; and Marta Werner, for her review of The Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by R. W. Franklin, Variorum Edition, 3 vols., Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998, which appeared in TEXT 12 (1999): 255-263.
• 1999 – Ronald A Bosco, Distinguished Service Professor of English and American Literature at the University at Albany and an editor of the Emerson Papers at the Houghton Library of Harvard University, for his review “The Expanding Textual Circle of New England Transcendentalism” in volume 11 of Text.
• 1997 – Dale Kramer, for “The Compositor as Copy-Text,” a review of George Eliot’s Romola, edited by Andrew Brown. The review appeared in volume 9 of Text.
• 1995 – George Geckle, Professor of English at the University of South Carolina, for his review of three editions of Dr. Faustus in volume 7 of Text.