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 (1943–2007) was not only the most eminent and inspirational Anglophone scholar of French literature and theory of his generation, but 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 prize competition is usually announced towards the end of the calendar year, with a deadline near the end of February in the new year. A small international panel, chairsd by the President or Vice-President of the Society for French Studies, reads and assesses the articles. The winner, announced in the Spring on the website, on Francofil, and in the French Studies Bulletin, receives a prize of £1000 and is invited, as a guest of the Society, to that summer’s Annual Conference (with conference fees and accommodation costs covered by the Society).
2024 Entries
Entries for 2024 are open now. The closing date is 27 February 2025.
The Society invites nominations of articles published during 2024 from editors of learned journals, editors or publishers of collected volumes, and heads of university departments. Authors may not self-nominate (but may ask editors, publishers, or university departments to consider nominating them). Articles may be published anywhere in the world, but must be written in French or English.
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.
Conditions and how to enter
To be eligible for nomination, authors:
- must be current PhD students or recent students within five years of having obtained their PhD when their article was published. Due allowance will be made for career interruptions that have prevented research and publication, such as parental leave or sick leave.
- must have been registered for their PhD and/or worked since then in a Department of French/Modern Languages, or equivalent (typically one in which there is an institutional commitment, in pedagogy and in research methodology, to the study of French-language materials in the original language).
Nominators should submit entries by email, any time before the deadline, to Professor Nick Harrison (nicholas.harrison@kcl.ac.uk), together with:
- a PDF file of the article as it appears in print. Nominations not accompanied by a PDF file will not be valid;
- a statement that includes (i) full publication details of the article concerned and (ii) an indication of how the candidate satisfies the two criteria for eligibility specified above. There is no need to offer any appraisal or justification for the nomination.
Previous recipients
2023
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 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’ |
|---|---|
| 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)’ |
|---|---|
| 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’ |
|---|---|
| Institution | University of Nottingham |
| Publication | 'French Studies' 77:2 (April 2023), 167–82 |
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 |
|---|---|
| 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’ |
|---|---|
| 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.’ |
|---|---|
| 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’ |
|---|---|
| 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 |
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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' |
|---|---|
| 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 |
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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 |
|---|---|
| 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 Nick Harrison
King's College London
Virginia Woolf Building
22 Kingsway, London,
WC2B 6NR
Entries for 2024 are open now. The closing date is 27 February 2025.