Congratulations to Toby Nash, winner of the 2016 Greg Dening Memorial Prize!
Established in 2009, the prize is offered to honour the work and ideas of Professor Greg Dening. The Greg Dening Memorial Prize is awarded to the graduate article submitted to the Melbourne Historical Journal which best engages with the broad themes and methodologies that were resonant in Greg’s own work and ideas.
Toby was awarded the prize for his article examining a crossroads between urban and maritime history, using the case of the wharves of pre-Revolutionary Boston to analyse the contested imperial space of the waterfront in the Age of Sail.
The prize judging committee commented:
Toby Nash’s article ‘The Colonial Waterfront as Borderlands: A Spatial Investigation into Boston’s Docks, 1700–1775’ builds on a tradition of historical scholarship about liminal, borderlands and contact zones that includes of course Dening’s own work on islands and beaches and shipboard communities. Nash succeeds admirably in combining close attention to the economic functioning of the port area with nuanced elucidation of its symbolic and ritual aspects. The explication of the theatre of imperial strength and of simultaneous signs of its fragility gave this article an impressive complexity and richness.
Toby is currently completing his MA at the University of Melbourne. His thesis research looks at waterfront riots and struggles for control over commerce at the docks in British-American port cities.
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