Malcolm Bowie Prize
The Malcolm Bowie Prize is awarded each year by the Society for French Studies for the best article published in the preceding year by an early-career researcher in the broader discipline of French Studies. Malcolm Bowie (1943–2007) 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 in the UK and beyond. His service to the Society for French Studies is just one example: 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 researchers are eligible, since he was a remarkable mentor to countless younger scholars, nationally and internationally.
The competition for the best article published in 2024 will be publicized in due course, and will open before the end of the year, with a deadline in early 2025.
2023 Recipients
We are very pleased to announce the winner of the Malcolm Bowie Prize. This year’s prize was judged by a panel composed of Nicholas Harrison (King’s College London, Panel Chair and SFS Vice-President), Diana Holmes (Leeds, SFS Vice-President), Shirley Jordan (Newcastle), Judith Miller (NYU), and Downing Thomas (Iowa).
24 eligible entries were received, representing many different areas of French studies, and demonstrating in many different ways the breadth and vitality of the discipline. Each was read and evaluated by 2 judges in the first round, and on the basis of their rankings and comments a shortlist of 5 was compiled. Each shortlisted article was then read by the whole panel.
Winner: Doyle Calhoun
Project | 'Variations on Verrition: (Re)turning to the Enigmatic Final Word of Aimé Césaire's Cahier d'un retour au pays natal’ |
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Institution | University of Cambridge |
Publication | 'PMLA' 138:2 (2023), 306–20 https://doi.org/10.1632/S0030812923000159 |
Runner up: Victoria Baena
Project | ‘Cartographies of Region and Empire: Scaling Le Tour de la France par deux enfants (and its Afterlives)’ |
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Institution | University of Cambridge |
Publication | 'Dix-Neuf' (2023), 1–21 https://doi.org/10.1080/14787318.2023.2278853 |
Runner up: Liam Lewis
Project | ‘Rewilding with the cri in Medieval French Texts: Yvain and Mélusine’ |
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Institution | University of Nottingham |
Publication | 'French Studies' 77:2 (April 2023), 167–82 |
Previous recipients
2022
We are delighted to announce both the winners of this year’s prize, while also lauding the quality of the following articles that were shortlisted:
Maury Bruhn : ‘Le Temps retourné: Temporal Distortion in À la recherche du temps perdu and Twin Peaks: The Return’ (L’Esprit Créateur, vol. 62, no. 3, Fall 2022).
Joseph R. Johnson : ‘The Physician’s Species: Knowledge and Power in the Animal Clinic.’ (Romanic Review 113.1 [May 2022]).
Blase Provitola: ‘TERF or Transfeminist Avant la Lettre?: Monique Wittig’s Complex Legacy in Trans Studies’ (TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 9:3 [August 2022]).
Alice Roulliere : ‘Mocking the Fear of Ghosts in Ronsard’s Hymnes (1555–56).’ (French Studies 76, 2022, Vol. 76).
Usha Rungoo: ‘Creolization Otherwise : Centering the Local Intertextualities of Ananda Devi’s Pagli’ (PMLA, vol. 137, issue 5, October 2022).
Maria Beliaeva Solomon: ‘Fatal Attraction: Loving the Guillotined Woman, from Washington Irving to Alexandre Dumas’ (French Forum, Spring 2022).
Winner: Katie Pleming
Project | Incest, affect and ambiguous politics in two films by Claire Denis |
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Institution | University of Edinburgh |
In this essay I examine two films in which Denis represents the possibility of incest: 35 rhums/35 Shots of Rum (2008) and High Life. Focusing first on the ambiguous mise-en-scene of father–daughter interactions, and subsequently on the affective impact of this framing, I explore the ethical and political contours of Denis’s strategic destabilizing of certainty in her representation of father–daughter relationships. |
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Publication | 'Screen', Volume 63, Issue 3, Autumn 2022, pp. 309–326. |
Runner up: Patrick Luiz Sullivan de Oliveira
Project | ‘Transforming a Brazilian Aeronaut into a French Hero: Celebrity, Spectacle, and Technological Cosmopolitanism in the Turn-of-the-Century Atlantic’ |
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Institution | Princeton University |
This article explains how the Brazilian Alberto Santos-Dumont, who at the turn of the twentieth century became the first global celebrity aeronaut, operated as a symbol of ‘technological cosmopolitanism’ — a world view that ostensibly promoted a vision of global unity through technology-enabled exchanges while simultaneously reproducing a core-periphery imagined geography that threatened to erase marginalized populations. Technological cosmopolitanism fitted snugly within the rubric of the Third Republic’s aspiring universalism, which assumed that France offered a model to be emulated around the world, but it was not hegemonic. If for the French appropriating Santos-Dumont meant safeguarding France’s leadership in aeronautics and assuaging their claims of universality, for Brazilians the elision was marked by ambiguity. Brazil’s First Republic hungered for heroes, and authorities saw Santos-Dumont as a symbol of modernity that showed that its place in world history was more than peripheral, even though that very vision was shaped by a Paris-centric world view. But marginalized Afro-Brazilians also found ways to appropriate a white ‘Frenchified’ Brazilian and reimagine their place in a cosmopolitan order. Technological cosmopolitanism evoked a world united by transportation, communication and exchange, but imagining who got to construct and partake in that community was a process continuously marked by erasures and reinsertions. |
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Publication | 'Past & Present', Volume 254, Issue 1, February 2022, pp. 235–275. |
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.’ |
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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. |
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Publication | ‘French Historical Studies’ (2021) 44 (4): 675–709. |
Runner up: Emma Claussen
Project | ‘Montaigne’s vagabond styles: political homelessness in the sixteenth century’ |
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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?’ |
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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 |
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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 |
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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' |
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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 |
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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' |
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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' |
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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’ |
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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’ |
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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 |
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Institution | Columbia University |
Publication | New Medieval Literatures, 17 (2017), 62-80 |
Runner up: Andrea Gadberry
Project | The Cupid and the Cogito: Cartesian Poetics |
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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 |
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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 |
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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 |
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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 |
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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 |
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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 |
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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’ |
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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' |
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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’ |
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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’ |
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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’ |
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Institution | University of Exeter |
Publication | Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France, 107 (2007), 541–57 |
Professor Nick Harrison
King's College London
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