Photos: Amy Wike, Eliza French

The next time you’re in the shop, look for the Phillips Book Prize display, highlighting a series of first books sponsored by the museum’s Center for the Study of Modern Art.

The Center awards a biennial book prize for an unpublished manuscript presenting new research in modern or contemporary art from 1780 to the present. Preference is given to applicants whose research focuses on subjects related to the Phillips’s areas of collecting. Scholars who received their PhDs within the past five years are strongly encouraged to apply. The winning author receives $5,000, and his or her manuscript will be published by the University of California Press.

UC Press has published five books in the series so far. The museum has awarded the sixth and seventh prizes, and the manuscripts for those books are in the works.

A complete list of the winning manuscripts is below:

Alicia Volk, In Pursuit of Universalism: Yorozu Tetsugoro and Japanese Modern Art
Terri Weissman, The Realisms of Berenice Abbott
André Dombrowski, Cézanne, Murder, and Modern Life
Lauren Kroiz, Creative Composites, Modernism, Race, and the Stieglitz Circle
Robert Slifkin, Out of Time: Philip Guston and the Refiguration of Postwar American Art
Charles F.B. Miller, Radical Picasso: Surrealism and the Theory of the Avant-Garde (expected 2015)
Joyce Tsai, Painting after Photography (expected 2016)

Eliza French, Manager of Center Initiatives