In 2013 the Levin Prize, formerly awarded every two years to the best book in "literary criticism," began to be awarded annually to the best first book in the field of Comparative Literature. Full citations for all prize-winning books are available here.

 

2013

Mary Franklin-Brown. Reading the World: Encyclopedic Writing in the Scholastic Age. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. 

Honorable mention: Jacob Edmond, A Common Strangeness: Contemporary Poetry, Cross-Cultural Encounter, Comparative Literature. New York: Fordham UP, 2012. 
Honorable mention:Shaden M. Tageldin, Disarming Words: Empire and the Seductions of Translation in Egypt.Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011. 

2011

Jahan Ramazani. A Transnational Poetics. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2009. (CITATION)

First Runner Up: Andrew Piper. Dreaming in Books: The Making of the Bibliographic Imagination in the Romantic Age. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2009. 
Second Runner Up: Margaret Cohen. The Novel and the Sea. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2010. 

2009

Ross Hamilton. Accident: A Philosophical and Literary History. (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2007) 
Adam Potkay. The Story of Joy: From the Bible to Late Romanticism. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007) 

2007

Lois Parkinson Zamora. The Inordinate Eye: New World Baroque and Latin American Fiction. (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2006)

Honorable Mention: Wai Chee Dimock. Through Other Continents: American Literature Across Deep Time. (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2006)

2005

Seth Lerer, Error and The Academic Self: The Scholarly Imagination, Medieval To Modern(Columbia UP, 2002)