Malcolm Bowie Prize
In 2008 the Society for French Studies launched an annual Malcolm Bowie Prize, to be awarded for the best article published in the preceding year by an early-career researcher in the broader discipline of French Studies.
Malcolm Bowie was not only the most eminent and inspirational Anglophone scholar of French literature and theory of his generation, he was a towering figure in the field because of his tireless devotion to the scholarly community both in the UK and abroad, his service to the Society for French Studies offering but one example of this: he was President of the Society from 1994-96, as well as General editor of its journal (French Studies) 1980-87. The Society felt that it was particularly appropriate to honour his memory by founding a prize for which only early-career scholars will be eligible, since he was a remarkable mentor to countless younger scholars, both in the UK and abroad.
2016 Recipients
Winner: Tobias Warner
| Project | How Mariama Bâ Became World Literature: Translation and the Legibility of Feminist Critique |
|---|---|
| Institution | UC Davis |
| Publication | PMLA, 131: 5 (October 2016), 1239-55 |
Runner up: Dónal Hassett
| Project | Pupilles de l’Empire: Debating the Provision for Child Victims of the Great War in the French Empire |
|---|---|
| Institution | University of Bristol |
| Publication | French Historical Studies, 39: 2 (April 2016), 315-45 |
2017 competition
The 2017 Malcolm Bowie prize competition is now closed.
The award includes:
- a cash prize of £1000;
- expenses-paid travel to the next annual conference of the Society for French Studies;
- mention in the French Studies Bulletin and on the Society for French Studies website.
Conditions of entry
The Society invites nominations of articles published in 2017 from editors of learned journals, editors or publishers of collected volumes, and heads of university departments. Authors may not self-nominate (though they may ask editors, publishers, or university departments to consider nominating them). To be eligible for nomination, authors must be within five years of obtaining their PhD when their article is published (in this instance anyone who received his or her PhD in or after 2012 but before the end of 2017). In addition, they must either have been registered for their PhD or worked since then in a Department of French/Modern Languages, or equivalent. Articles may be published anywhere in the world, but must be written in French or English.
Nominations should be submitted by email to Professor Judith Still (judith.still@nottingham.ac.uk), together with a statement which includes full publication details of the article concerned and an indication of how the candidate satisfies the two criteria for eligibility specified above. Nominations should be accompanied by a PDF file of the article as it appears in print. Nominations not accompanied by a PDF file will not be valid.
The deadline for receipt of nominations for the 2017 Prize (including the article itself) is 27 January 2018. Entries may be submitted immediately.
Previous recipients
2015
Winner: Jennifer Rushworth
| Project | Proust, Derrida, and the Promise of Writing |
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| Publication | French Studies, 69.2 (April 2015), 205-29. |
2014
Winner: Edward Baring
| Project | Ne me raconte plus d’histoires: Derrida and the Problem of the History of Philosophy |
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| Institution | Harvard University, 2009 |
| Publication | History and Theory, 53.2 (2014), 175-193; |
Winner: Chad B. Denton
| Project | Steel of Victory, Scrap of Defeat: Mobilizing the French Home Front, 1939-40 |
|---|---|
| Institution | PhD (University of California, Berkeley, 2009) |
| Publication | War & Society, 33.2 (2014), 98-130. |
Runner up: Katie Hornstein
| Project | Suspended Collectivity: Horace Vernet’s The Crossing of the Arcole Bridge(1826)’ |
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| Institution | PhD (University of Michigan, 2010) |
| Publication | Art History, 37.3 (2014), 428-53; |
Runner up: Robert St. Clair
| Project | Laughing Matter(s): Poetics, Politics, and Ethics of the (Utopian) Body in Rimbaud’s Effarés |
|---|---|
| Institution | PhD (University of Minnesota, 2011) |
| Publication | Romanic Review, 104.1-2 (2013), 117-38 [article published in 2014] |
2013
Winner: Christopher Churchill
| Project | ‘The Unlikely Barrèsian Inheritance of Albert Camus’ |
|---|---|
| Institution | Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario |
| Publication | , Journal of the Canadian Historical Association / Revue de la Société historique du Canada 23:2 (2012), 251-297. [Journal year 2012, number published in 2013.] |
Runner up: Jennifer Edwards
| Project | ‘“Man Can be Subject to Woman”: Female Monastic Authority in Fifteenth-Century Poitiers' |
|---|---|
| Institution | Illinois at Urbana-Champaign |
| Publication | Gender & History 25:1 (2013), 86-106 |
Runner up: Michael Meere
| Project | ‘La violence sur la scène classique: une question de (dé)goût’ |
|---|---|
| Institution | University of Virginia |
| Publication | L’Invention du mauvais goût à l’âge classique (XVIIe-XVIIIe siècle), ed. Carine Barbafieri and Jean-Christophe Abramovici (Éditions Peeters, 2013), 123-40 |
2012
Winner: Hannah Freed-Thall
| Project | 'Prestige of a Momentary Diamond: Economies of Distinction in Proust’ |
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| Institution | University of California at Berkeley |
| Publication | New Literary History (2012) |
Runner up: Elizabeth Everton
| Project | ‘Scenes of Perception and Revelation: Gender and Truth in Anti-Dreyfusard Caricature’ |
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| Institution | UCLA |
| Publication | French Historical Studies (2012) |
2011
Winner: Andrew Counter
| Project | ‘One of Them: Homosexuality and Anarchism in Wilde and Zola’ |
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| Institution | University of Cambridge |
| Publication | Comparative Literature 63.4 (Fall 2011), 345-65. |
Runner up: Maria Muresan
| Project | ‘Wittgenstein in Recent French Poetics: Henri Meschonnic and Jacques Roubaud’ |
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| Publication | Paragraph 34.3 (November 2011), 423–40. |
2010
Winner: Frédérique Aït-Touati
| Project | ‘Penser le ciel à l’âge classique: Fiction, hypothèse et astronomie de Kepler à Huygens' |
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| Publication | Annales HSS (March–April 2010), 325–44. |
Runner up: Rowan Tomlinson
| Project | ‘“Intelligible sans discipline”: enumeration, observation, and communication in Montaigne's Apologie de Raimond Sebond’, |
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| Publication | in Stephen Bamforth (ed.), Nouveaux Départs: Studies in Honour of Michel Jeanneret, Nottingham French Studies, 49:3 (2010), 87–109. |
2009
Winner: Dorian Bell
| Project | ‘The Jew as Model: Anti-Semitism, Aesthetics, and Epistemology in Manette Salomon’ |
|---|---|
| Institution | University of California at Irvine |
| Publication | Modern Language Notes, 124:4 (September 2009), 825–47 |
2008
Winner: Luke Sunderland
| Project | ‘Le Cycle de Renart: From the Enfances to the Jugement in a Cyclical Roman de Renart Manuscript’ |
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| Institution | Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge |
| Publication | French Studies, 62 (2008), 1–12 |
Runner up: Simon Kemp
| Project | ‘Darrieussecq’s Mind’ |
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| Institution | St John's College, Oxford |
| Publication | French Studies, 62 (2008), 429–41 |
2007
Winner: Miranda Gill
| Project | ‘The Myth of the Female Dandy’ |
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| Institution | University of Cambridge |
| Publication | French Studies 61 (2007), 167–81 |
Winner: Hugh Roberts
| Project | ‘La tête de Bruscambille et les métaphores mentales au début du XVIIe siècle’ |
|---|---|
| Institution | University of Exeter |
| Publication | Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France, 107 (2007), 541–57 |
Professor Judith Still
Department of Modern Languages and Cultures
University of Nottingham
Nottingham NG7 2RD