The Medieval and Renaissance Drama Society awards annual prizes to recognize achievement in publication, conference presentation, and archives research in the field of early drama studies: http://themrds.org/upcoming-awards

For an essay or book published in the 18 months before January 30, 2017:

• Martin Stevens Award for best new essay in early drama studies ($250 award + one year membership in MRDS)
• Barbara Palmer Award for best new essay in early drama archival research ($250 award + one year membership in MRDS)
• David Bevington Award for best new book in early drama studies (non-Shakespearean, no edited volumes) ($500 award + two years membership in MRDS)

For a conference paper presented in the 12 months before January 30, 2017:

• Alexandra Johnston Award for best conference paper in early drama studies by a graduate student ($250 award + one year membership in MRDS)

Entry Information

Deadline for nominations: January 30, 2017

Eligibility: All MRDS members and non-members

The Judges: Each category of submissions is judged by committees made up of members of the MRDS Executive Council.

Submissions:

For the Palmer and Stevens Awards, please send the published article as an attachment to an email addressed to kipling@humnet.ucla.edu. The committee will consider any essay published within 18 months of the deadline and judged by the committee to be of outstanding quality. Qualifying essays published in a collection may be submitted for the Stevens and Palmer Awards.

For the Bevington Award, please send one hard copy of the book (plus a copy in digital form if you like). An author unable to supply a hard copy, may submit the book in digital form only, though hard copy is preferred. The committee will consider any book of high quality published within the last 18 months. Publishers: please limit submissions for the Bevington to two books per year. NOTE: Edited collections and Shakespearean studies are not eligible for the Bevington Award.

For the Johnston Award, papers should not exceed 5,000 words, excluding notes, and should include the name and date of the conference at which the paper was delivered, and the
presenter’s name, the title of the paper, and a contact number or email. We encourage graduate students to seek out a mentor to review their work before submission. MRDS members are happy to serve as mentors.

Send one copy of each book to the address below (hard copy or digital). Articles and papers may be submitted digitally, either in .pdf or .doc format via email, or on a CD-Rom. If submitted in hardcopy, send three copies of each essay or paper. Please direct all submissions to:

Gordon Kipling
3428 Park Ave.
Minneapolis, MN 55407
USA
kipling@humnet.ucla.edu

Announcement of Award Winners

Awards announcement and presentation will take place during the annual MRDS business meeting in May 2016, at the 51st International Congress on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, MI.

Australasian Centre for Italian Studies – The Jo-Anne Duggan Prize

Jo-Anne Duggan (1962-2011) was a great artist and a great friend of the Australasian Centre for Italian Studies (ACIS). Her artistic practice left what is arguably the richest and most compelling recent collection of photographs by an Australian artist to engage with Italian culture, history and art. Her work demonstrates not only artistic rigour and depth but also remarkable breadth, spanning from public spaces/places of Italian diaspora in Australia to enquiries into the re-contextualisation and museification of Renaissance art, from Australian archives of Italian migration to complex case studies on the legacy of the Gonzagas. In her research-led and interdisciplinary endeavour, Jo-Anne asked crucial questions and opened up original paths with regard to the construction of space/place, our relationship with the past and its reception, and the role of photographic art in mobilising and questioning the viewer’s gaze, starting from what she called her ‘postcolonial eye’.

To honour her memory, ACIS, with the generous support of Kevin Bayley, The Colour Factory and the editorial committee of Portal: Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies, established a biennial Jo-Anne Duggan Essay Prize which was awarded for the first time in 2015. The aim of the Prize is to foster and expand Jo-Anne’s rich creative, artistic and scholarly legacy in order to maintain enquiry into the nexus between creative practice and research, especially among younger/emerging scholars. The Prize is designed to keep Jo-Anne’s questions alive in order to continue to learn from her own answers.

THE PRIZE

Up to three awards may be made:

• $1,000 for the best entry (essay or creative work with accompanying exegesis); it will also be mentored for submission in a top quartile journal for publication;
• $250 each for two highly-commended entries (essay or creative work with accompanying exegesis)

All three award-winners will be invited to present their submissions at the ACIS biennial conference at the Monash Prato Centre (Italy), 4-7 July 2017, for which their full conference registration will be paid.

One award will be reserved for an entry of sufficient merit by a student.

CATEGORIES

The assessment criteria will be weighted appropriately for each of the two categories:

1) Essay category

Originality; argument; conceptual framework (cultural and/or historical context); approach/methodology; engagement with any aspect of Duggan’s research or creative output; knowledge of scholarship in field; critical analysis; focus; written expression/style; structure; referencing.

2) Creative work with accompanying exegesis category:

Creative work: originality; competence in the specialized medium and its artistic/industry standards;

Exegesis (a critical interpretation informing the creative work): purpose/process of the creative practice/product; conceptual framework (artistic, cultural and/or historical context); approach/methodology; engagement with any aspect of Duggan’s research or creative output; knowledge of scholarship in field; focus; written expression/style; structure; referencing.

GUIDELINES

The details of the GUIDELINES for eligibility and submissions for the 2017 Prize are available:
https://acis.org.au/guidelines-for-2017-jo-anne-duggan-prize

CALL FOR ENTRIES BY: 3 MARCH, 2017

ENQUIRIES

• Dr Catherine Dewhirst: catherine.dewhirst@usq.edu.au
• Dr Malcolm Angelucci: malcolm.angelucci@unimelb.edu.au

We are very pleased to announce that, beginning in 2017, the Medieval Academy of America will add a Digital Humanities Prize to its suite of publication honors, to be awarded alongside the Haskins Medal, the Brown Prize, and the Elliott Prize. The annual Medieval Academy of America Digital Humanities Prize will be awarded to an outstanding digital research project in Medieval Studies created and launched within the last five years. The Prize – an award of $1,000 – will be presented at the Medieval Academy of America’s Annual Meeting.

The Digital Initiatives Advisory Board (DIAB) of the Medieval Academy of America will select the award-winning project based on DIAB’s established criteria for high-quality digital medievalist projects, considering the following criteria, among others: quality of research and contributions to Medieval Studies; goals and methodologies of the project; design, presentation, and accessibility of the project; sustainability of the project and compatibility of its metadata.

Nominations are now being accepted online and must be submitted by midnight on October 15. Click here for more information about the Medieval Academy of America Digital Humanities Prize.

The Gender and Medieval Studies Group offers a postgraduate student essay prize, which is awarded at the GMS conference in January each year. The competition is open to students at all levels including those who will be completing their degree in the coming year.

Essays should be between 4,000 and 6,000 words in length (including notes) and should engage with questions of gender and/or sexuality in the Middle Ages. Essays should follow a recognised academic referencing system (such as MHRA), should include a bibliography and all images should be captioned.

Submissions from postgraduates working within any discipline in the field are encouraged.

The prize gives free registration to the GMS conference (held every January at a different UK institution) for two years (2017 and 2018) and a contribution towards UK travel costs to the conference. In 2017 the conference will be on Gender, Places, Spaces, Thresholds and will be held at Canterbury, Christchurch University (12th-15th January).

The winning essay will also be considered for publication in the academic journal Medieval Feminist Forum, run by the Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship (SMFS).

There may be years when no prize is awarded, depending upon submissions in any given year.

Electronic submissions should be submitted to Isabel Davis (i.davis@bbk.ac.uk) by November 21, 2016.