The American Institute of the History of Pharmacy is pleased to announce that Laura Phillips Sawyer has been selected to receive the 2016 Glenn Sonnedecker Prize for her article, “California Fair Trade: Antitrust and the Politics of “Fairness” in U.S. Competition Policy” (Business History Review, doi:10.1017/S0007680515001063). 

This $1,000 prize honors the contributions of Glenn Sonnedecker to the field of the history of pharmacy and aims to encourage research in subjects central to his work.  The Sonnedecker Prize is awarded annually for the best original article published on the history of some facet of pharmacy practice or pharmacy education in the United States (including the Colonial period). 

The article by Prof. Sawyer focuses on the efforts of California pharmacist Edna Gleason to combat unfair competition in the sale of medicines by organizing her fellow retail pharmacists during the 1930s.  The article demonstrates how community pharmacy is fertile ground for case studies in American economic history.  

Sawyer is an assistant professor in the Business, Government, and International Economy Unit at Harvard Business School. She received her Ph.D. in History from the University of Virginia and subsequently held a postdoctoral fellowship at Brown University’s Political Theory Project. She also received the Harvard-Newcomen Fellowship in Business History at HBS before joining the faculty. Her work has appeared in the Journal for the Gilded Age and Progressive Era and Business History Review. Sawyer’s book, American Fair Trade: Proprietary Capitalism, Associations, and the New Competition, 1890-1940, is under contract with Cambridge University Press.