To celebrate CSSH‘s 60th anniversary in 2018, the journal’s editors organized an annual article award in commemoration of the late Sir Jack Goody (1919-2015). Jack Goody was a frequent author and contributor to the journal over the course of five decades. The award named in his honor is granted to the article that best represents the mission of the journal in a given volume.

Jack Goody was a CSSH consulting editor, and for many years he was the only non-University of Michigan member of our editorial committee. In addition to numerous book reviews and behind-the-scenes commentary on manuscripts, Goody published six essays in CSSH. The first appeared in 1963, under CSSH‘s founding editor, Sylvia Thrupp; the last came in 2006, under Tom Trautmann. The concerns that dominated Goody’s work (orality and literacy, kinship and inheritance, the culture of flowers, metallurgy, pottery, and haute cuisine) are brilliantly arrayed in these essays.

Since 2009, when CSSH started counting, Goody’s 1963 inaugural article, coauthored with Ian Watt, “The Consequences of Literacy” (5–3: 304–45), has been viewed on our Cambridge website 6,410 times, and it is currently the fifth most widely cited CSSH essay. Goody’s final appearance in CSSH, a review of Victor Lieberman’s Strange Parallels (Volumes 1 and 2), came in 2012, almost half a century after his foundational article with Ian Watt. CSSH was fortunate to have Jack Goody’s wise counsel, and his best intellectual efforts, for so long.