Malcolm Bowie Prize

The Society is delighted to announce that the winner of the 2020 Malcolm Bowie prize is Vanessa Brutsche, for her article 'Duras’s Aurélia Steiner and the Ethics of Cinematic Form', which appeared in French Studies, 74.3 (July 2020), 403–19. Dr Brutsche (PhD UC Berkeley, 2017) is Assistant Professor of French in the Department of World Languages and Cultures at the University of Utah.

This year's runner-up is Benjamin Dalton (PhD King’s College London, 2020) for his article 'Forms of Freedoms: Marie Darrieussecq, Catherine Malabou, and the Plasticity of Science', Dalhousie French Studies, 115 (2020), 55–73. Dr Dalton is currently a lecteur of English at Université Paris Nanterre in the faculty of Langues et Cultures Étrangères (LCE)

Awards for all Society prizes for both 2019 and 2020 will be presented at our 2021 virtual conference, but winners from this year and last will be invited to attend in person the postponed annual conference in Belfast 2022.

These guidelines relate to the 2020 round of the competition and may be updated for the 2021 round.

The Society invites nominations of articles published in 2020 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 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 extended deadline for receipt of nominations for the 2020 Prize (including the article itself) is 28 February 2021. Entries may be submitted immediately.

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 2019 competition comprised Judith Still (SFS President), Michael Syrotinski (SFS Vice-President), Shirley Jordan (Newcastle), Judith Miller (NYU), and Pierre-St. Amand (Yale). 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.