Malcolm Bowie Prize

The judging panel for this year (essays published in 2018) consisted of five members: The President and Vice-President of the Society (Judith Still and Bill Burgwinkle), Christie McDonald (Harvard), Ian Maclachlan (Oxford), and Judith Miller (New York University).

Twenty-four essays were nominated and submitted for consideration, up four from the previous year, and they came from a number of international sources:

UK (Oxford, Birmingham, Cambridge, SOAS)

UK-Scotland (Glasgow, St Andrews)

USA (Bentley, Harvard, Chicago, New York University, Louisiana, Manchester,

Michigan, Florida, Dickinson, Missouri)

France (Bordeaux)

Germany (Munich)

Ireland (Dublin)

The range of publications in which the articles appeared also ranged widely and included:

French Studies, Studies in French Cinema, French Review, French Cultural Studies, Contemporary French Civilization, PMLA, Research in African Literatures, Bulletin des amis d’André Gide, Montaigne Studies, New Literary History, Renaissance Drama, Paragraph, Culture and Theory, Exemplaria, L’Esprit créateur, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, Performance Research, Nineteenth-century French Studies, MLN, Nottingham French Studies, and Monde français du dix-huitième siècle.

Nominations were received from both journal editors and university departments, almost equally.

This was a very strong year indeed and seven essays were forwarded to the panel as an extended shortlist.

Outcome

The prize was awarded to Laura Hughes, from New York University, for her essay, ‘In the library of Jacques Derrida: manuscript materiality after the archival turn’, which appeared in New Literary History, 49.3 (Summer 2018), 403-424.

The runner-up, who receives our commendation, is: Yan Wang, from the Université Bordeaux Montaigne, for the essay, ‘L’écriture et le problème de l’ancienne histoire chinoise’, which was published in Monde français du dix-huitième siècle, 3.1 (2018), 1-20.

The Society would like to thank and congratulate the authors of these extraordinary essays, the nominators, for their interest in our studies, and the panel of external judges who offered so freely of their time and expertise.

The Society invites nominations of articles published in 2019 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 their PhD in or after 2013 but before the end of 2019). 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 Michael Syrotinski (Michael.Syrotinski@glasgow.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 2019 Prize (including the article itself) is 31 January 2020. Entries may be submitted immediately.