The Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship Book Committee is now accepting submissions for the 2022 Best First Book of Feminist Scholarship on the Middle Ages. The competition is open to first monographs in any area of medieval studies. Nominated books should represent the best first monographs of feminist medieval scholarship published AND with a copyright date in 2020 or 2021.
The prize (an award of $500), will be announced in the spring, and formally awarded at the SMFS reception at the Kalamazoo International Medieval Congress in May of 2022. Self-nominations are acceptable; presses may nominate more than one title.
Please arrange for TWO copies (preferably hard copies) of each nominated book to be sent to SMFS President, Dr. Melissa Ridley Elmes, at the address below, along with a letter of application that summarizes the book’s merits and its contribution to feminist scholarship. The deadline for nominations and receipt of books to be considered is Friday, 29 October 2021. Please note that if your book is copyrighted for 2022, you should wait for the next iteration of this contest, in two years.
Please send all submissions (remember: two copies!) to:
Melissa Ridley Elmes
McCluer Hall
209 S. Kingshighway
St. Charles, Missouri 63301
If you have an e-book version of your book available to send, please make sure that it can be duplicated so that everyone on the committee is able to read the book, and that it is not owner- or password-protected. Please also remember that sending proofs of a book that is as yet unpublished might be a violation of copyright law, so if that is what you have available, you must check with the publisher to make sure that the use of the proofs for the purposes of the prize contest is acceptable to them.
Please also note that the SMFS Advisory Board’s Book Committee has limited numbers of members with fluency in (modern) languages other than English, so if you are interested in submitting a monograph in a language other than English please do send a query BEFORE sending the book so that we can see if we have members available to read and assess it.Thank you for your consideration.
