SHA President’s Award for Student Scholarship

The Society for Humanistic Anthropology (SHA) announces our competition for student writing, the SHA Presidents Award for Graduate Student Writing, and the SHA Presidents Award for Undergraduate Student Writing, and invites submissions in both categories.

A committee drawn from current, past, and incoming SHA Presidents will judge the papers on originality, creativity, clarity of writing, and most importantly, contribution to humanistic anthropology. We are interested in the extent to which the papers explore what anthropology reveals about being human, capture the ways in which people create and/or transform meaning in various contexts, address the relationships between researcher and subjects, challenge conventional academic writing through alternative literary genres, and make anthropology accessible to the general public. 

Papers should be 7-10 pages in length (double-spaced and in 12-pt font, excluding references), and should be submitted electronically. Papers should be accompanied by a brief cover letter, including academic affiliation, year in program of study, contact information, the category of submission (undergraduate or graduate), and relevant details about the paper (at which conference it was presented, if applicable, or for what course it was written).

Eligibility:

  • Submissions from graduate students must be a paper delivered at an academic conference.

  • Undergraduate submissions need not be conference papers.

  • Papers already published or accepted for publication at the time of submission are not eligible.

  • You need not be a member of the Society for Humanistic Anthropology to submit a paper, but we encourage students to join and participate in the Society.

  • Any student currently enrolled in any accredited college or university in any nation is eligible for these prizes.

  • Limit one submission per student.

The author of the winning paper in each category will receive an award certificate, $100 prize, and one year gift membership to the Society for Humanistic Anthropology and the American Anthropological Association. Winners will be announced on our website and in the SHA column in Anthropology News. First place winners will be invited to read at our awards sessions at the AAA meeting in November, where the awards will be presented.

Deadline: Submissions are now closed.

Submit
Three people playing guitars outdoors on a hill with a cityscape in the background during evening.

©Kristina Jacobsen, Sardigna

Past Winners

 

  • Graduate 1st, Jamie Davidson, Generating Intensities

    Graduate 2nd (tie), Cody Black, Analog Optimism: Newtro Listening, Vinyl Duration, and Poetics of Becoming in Neoliberal South Korea

    Graduate 2nd (tie), Nancy Chu, Empathy in the Field: Anthropology and the Vulnerable Observer

    Graduate 3rd, Wes Brunson, On Healing the Malinowskian Split: An Address to Learned Society

    Undergraduate 1st, Jamie O'Brien, This is What I Know: Lasting Effects of Basque Conflict Across Generations and Oceans

    Undergraduate 2nd, Uyen Dang, Being With: Place, Memory, Silence in Young Saigon

    Undergraduate 3rd, Stuart Ahn-Sones, God Alone is the Cure: The Affective Resonance of Online Self-Ruqya Healing

    Undergraduate Honorable Mention, Daniel Krugman, Visions of Solidarity: Social Change, Power, and Worlds Beyond Refuge

  • Graduate, Shozab Raza, The Making of a Revolutionary: Theorizing Mystical Marxism in Rural Pakistan

    Undergraduate, Caleb Sabatka, Literary Anthropology and an Anthropology of Writers as … Anthropologists

    Honorable Mention (ug), Adele Woodmansee, Families and Agriculture in San Miguel del Valle, Oaxaca, Mexico

  • Graduate, Gregory Mitchell, Framing the End(s) of Queer Anthropology

  • Graduate, Pearl Chan, Entangled Engagements: Identity, Community Action, and Anthropological Practice

    Undergraduate, Shad Stroh, "Please My Friend, Do Not Work Hard': Driving Taxi in Vancouver

    Honorable Mention (grad), Hisako Omori, Ecstatic Catholicism and the Global Cult of Mary

  • Graduate, Carrie Little Hersch, Who's Afraid of the Religious Right? Anthropological Issues in the Study of Religion and Politics

    Undergraduate, Claire-Marie Hefner, Conversion and Longing: Autonomy and Gendered Cultural Expectations in Indonesia

  • Graduate, Mara Buchbinder, It's either one pain or another pain': Social distress and somatic disruption in family chronic pain narratives

  • Graduate, Jennifer Stampe, Mixed Messages at the Museum: Representation, Transformation, Incommensurability

    Undergraduate, Mike Como, Negotiating Language and Power: Passive Responsibility as Social Action among Bilingual Salvadoran Immigrants in Suburban Long Island

  • Graduate, Marcy Brink-Danan, The Semiotics of Secrecy:  Silence, Intimacy, and Irony in Istanbul

    Undergraduate, Christopher Hagan, Practice Makes Perfect:  Doing Ethnography in Two St. Louis Buddhist Communities

  • Graduate, Erica Lehrer, In Praise of 'Passing': Vicarious Jewish Identity in Post-Holocaust, Post-Communist Poland

    Undergraduate, Sara Garber, An Oral History of American Jewish Culture: Immigration and Assimilation

Note: contest was not run all years, and all prizes were not awarded in every contest year. Should you have an addition or correction, please contact societyforhumanisticanthro@gmail.com