Application Deadline: Outstanding Dissertation in Disability History Award
May 30
The University of Illinois Press in partnership with the Disability Histories series and the Disability History Association is pleased to welcome submissions for the second annual Outstanding Dissertation in Disability History prize. This prize is awarded annually to recognize and reward exceptional work in disability history done by early-career scholars.
The winner will receive $1000 and an advance contract with the University of Illinois Press to publish their revised manuscript in the Disability Histories series. The prize award is contingent upon the author’s acceptance of the contract with the University of Illinois Press.
The prize is open to any dissertation written in English and defended within the three years preceding the award’s submission deadline. For the 2024 prize, we will consider dissertations defended between January 1, 2021 and December 31, 2023. Revised dissertations are welcomed and encouraged. Eligible dissertations may be submitted more than once for this prize.
To apply, please send a screen-readable PDF of your dissertation (or revised dissertation), CV, and cover letter with contact information to Alison Syring (asyring2@illinois.edu) with the subject line “Outstanding Dissertation in Disability History” by May 30, 2024. Receipt of the application will be acknowledged, and the winner will be announced by September 30, 2024.
More on the Disability Histories series: Disability Histories seeks scholarship that explores the lived experiences of individuals and groups from a broad range of societies, cultures, time periods, and geographic locations, who either identified as disabled or were considered by the dominant culture to be disabled.
We conceive of disability and disabled experiences broadly and seek to include scholarship that spans a range of embodiments, including the emerging field of mad studies. We are especially interested in scholarship that not only employs innovative approaches to using disability—in constant interaction with systems of race, class, gender, and sexuality—as an analytical tool to deepen our understanding of larger power relations, ideologies, and institutions, but also engages in meaningful dialogue with other subdisciplines within history, such as legal and political histories, social histories, histories of technology, science, and medicine, histories of the body and sexuality, and histories of the development of capitalism and imperialism. We welcome submissions from a variety of geopolitical locations, especially those that situate disability history outside European and North American contexts, including regions or nations that would become identified as the “global South.” We are interested in scholarship that moves beyond traditional disability frameworks and offers methodologies and approaches to disability history that are rooted in decolonial, transnational, and transimperial perspectives.
