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 to 1996, as well as General editor of its journal (French Studies) from 1980 to 1987. 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.
2022 Entries
Entries for 2022 are open now. The closing date is 28 February 2023.
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 and how to enter
These guidelines relate to the 2022 round of the competition.
The Society invites nominations of articles published during 2022 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). There is a limit of one entry per author per calendar year while eligible. Where more than one nomination for an author is received, the panel chair will ask for the author’s preference as to which entry goes forward. To be eligible for nomination, authors must be within five years of obtaining their PhD when their article is published. 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 Diana Holmes (d.holmes@leeds.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 2022 Prize (including the article itself) is 28 February 2023. Entries may be submitted immediately.
How the competition is judged
The articles are evaluated in two rounds. The competition is judged by a panel of 5 readers, including distinguished international scholars in French Studies. The panel for the 2021 competition comprised Diana Holmes (Leeds, SFS Vice-President), Shirley Jordan (Newcastle), Judith Miller (NYU), Michael Syrotinski (Glasgow and President of SFS), and Downing Thomas (Iowa). Each essay is read and evaluated by a panel member according to their area of expertise, avoiding any potential conflict of interest or personal association with the author. The articles scoring most highly in the first round are shortlisted, and progress to a second round, in which all judges read and score all articles. The prize is awarded to the article achieving the highest overall aggregate score from the panel of judges.
Previous recipients
2021
We are very pleased to announce the winning articles of the Malcolm Bowie Prize 2021.
This year’s prize was judged by a panel composed of Diana Holmes (Leeds, Panel Chair and SFS Vice-President), Shirley Jordan (Newcastle), Judith Miller (NYU), Michael Syrotinski (Glasgow and President of SFS), and Downing Thomas (Iowa).
36 eligible entries were received. Each was read and evaluated by 2 judges in the first round, and on the basis of their scores and comments a shortlist of 8 was compiled. Each shortlist article was then read by the whole panel, and from their detailed, careful evaluations the winner emerged.
The articles submitted ranged across the wide interdisciplinary field of French Studies and delighted the judges by their uniformly high intellectual quality and the evidence they provided of a dynamic, innovative international research community of Early Career scholars.
The decision was not easy because there were so many outstandingly good articles submitted, but we are very pleased to announce that the winner and the runners up are:
Winner: Hannah Frydman
| Project | ‘Freedom’s Sex Problem. Classified Advertising, Law, and the Politics of Reading in Third Republic France.’ |
|---|---|
| Institution | University of Washington |
Through the lens of newly developed classified advertising, this essay analyses the Third Republic’s effort to police reproduction and sexuality at the expense of the regime’s formal commitment to democratic freedom and expression. The judges found it to be a very fine piece of historical writing, meticulously researched and argued, providing a fascinating window into morality laws of the period and the ways in which they attempted to manage language, alongside an exploration of the complexities this situation brought to the commercial landscape of periodicals. It offers an original and illuminating perspective on sexuality and gender relations in the early decades of the Third Republic. |
|
| Publication | ‘French Historical Studies’ (2021) 44 (4): 675–709. |
Runner up: Emma Claussen
| Project | ‘Montaigne’s vagabond styles: political homelessness in the sixteenth century’ |
|---|---|
| Institution | University of Cambridge |
| Publication | ‘Forum for Modern Language Studies’ (2021) 57 (3): 273–290. |
Runner up: Luke Warde
| Project | ‘Louis-Ferdinand Céline: Trolling for Another Time?’ |
|---|---|
| Institution | Trinity College Dublin |
| Publication | ‘Dalhousie French Studies’ (2021) 118: 165–179. |
2020
Winner: Vanessa Brutsche
| Project | Duras’s Aurélia Steiner and the Ethics of Cinematic Form |
|---|---|
| Institution | University of Utah |
| Publication | French Studies, 74.3 (2020) |
Runner up: Ben Dalton
| Project | Forms of Freedoms: Marie Darrieussecq, Catherine Malabou, and the Plasticity of Science |
|---|---|
| Institution | University of Paris Nanterre |
| Publication | Dalhousie French Studies, 115 (2020) |
2019
Winner: Annabel Kim
| Project | 'The Excremental Poetics of Daniel Pennac’s Journal d’un corps' |
|---|---|
| Institution | Harvard University |
Annabel Kim (Harvard), for her article “The Excremental Poetics of Daniel Pennac’s Journal d’un corps,” published in French Studies, Vol. LXXIII, No. 3, 2019 |
|
| Publication | French Studies, 73.3 (2019) |
Runner up: Tracy Rutler
| Project | 'Prosthetic Matters: On Blindness, Machines, and Knowledge in Diderot's Letter on the Blind' |
|---|---|
| Institution | Pennsylvania State University |
| Publication | Criticism, 60.2 (2019) |
Runner up: Thibaut Radomme
| Project | 'Jeux de lettres, jeu du texte: l’hermétisme du "Roman de Fauvel" (Paris, BnF, français 146) au service de la satire' |
|---|---|
| Institution | Louvain-la-Neuve/Lausanne |
| Publication | Marion Uhlig et Martin Rohde (éd.), Belles Lettres: les figures de l’écrit au Moyen Âge, Wiesbaden, Reichert Verlag (Scrinium Friburgense, 44), 2019 |
2018
Winner: Laura Hughes
| Project | ‘In the library of Jacques Derrida: manuscript materiality after the archival turn’ |
|---|---|
| Institution | New York University |
| Publication | New Literary History, 49.3 (Summer 2018), 403-424 |
Runner up: Yan Wang
| Project | ‘L’écriture et le problème de l’ancienne histoire chinoise’ |
|---|---|
| Institution | Université Bordeaux Montaigne |
| Publication | Monde français du dix-huitième siècle, 3.1 (2018), 1-20. |
2017
Winner: Eliza Zingesser
| Project | Pidgin Poetics: Bird Talk in Medieval France and Occitania |
|---|---|
| Institution | Columbia University |
| Publication | New Medieval Literatures, 17 (2017), 62-80 |
Runner up: Andrea Gadberry
| Project | The Cupid and the Cogito: Cartesian Poetics |
|---|---|
| Institution | New York University |
| Publication | Critical Inquiry, 43.3 (Spring 2017), 738-51 |
Runner up: Annabel Kim
| Project | The Riddle of Racial Difference in Anne Garréta’s Sphinx |
|---|---|
| Institution | Harvard University |
| Publication | Diacritics, 45.1 (2017), 4-22 |
2016
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 |
2015
Winner: Jennifer Rushworth
| Project | Proust, Derrida, and the Promise of Writing |
|---|---|
| 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 |
|---|---|
| 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)’ |
|---|---|
| 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’ |
|---|---|
| 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’ |
|---|---|
| Institution | UCLA |
| Publication | French Historical Studies (2012) |
2011
Winner: Andrew Counter
| Project | ‘One of Them: Homosexuality and Anarchism in Wilde and Zola’ |
|---|---|
| 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’ |
|---|---|
| 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' |
|---|---|
| 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’, |
|---|---|
| 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’ |
|---|---|
| Institution | Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge |
| Publication | French Studies, 62 (2008), 1–12 |
Runner up: Simon Kemp
| Project | ‘Darrieussecq’s Mind’ |
|---|---|
| Institution | St John's College, Oxford |
| Publication | French Studies, 62 (2008), 429–41 |
2007
Winner: Miranda Gill
| Project | ‘The Myth of the Female Dandy’ |
|---|---|
| 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 Diana Holmes
School of Languages, Cultures and Societies,
University of Leeds
LEEDS
LS2 9JT
Entries for 2022 are open now. The closing date is 28 February 2023.