St Andrews Article Prize 2017

Award Winner

The 2017 St Andrews Article Prize in European Environmental History was awarded to Maïka De Keyzer for her article All we are is dust in the wind: The social causes of a “subculture of coping” in the late medieval coversand belt, published in the Journal for the History of Environment and Society, vol. 1, in 2016.

De Keyzer’s article makes a substantial contribution to the environmental history of pre-modern Europe through a sophisticated blend of social, economic and ecological history, based on an impressively diverse dataset. Her rigorously argued analyses addresses the culture of coping with potentially disastrous sand drifts in the Campine region, but will be insightful for any historian interested in ‘natural’ hazards and disasters, their associated cultures of resilience and related social structures irrespective of chronological era or region. The devised method of critically combining traditional archival sources with archaeological findings and optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) studies has a potential to change the way we understand the history of the conversand belt region and the historical coping mechanisms concerning the hazard of shifting sands.

The prize committee has also decided to give two honorary mentions to Johanna Conterio for a fascinating insight into the construction of subtropical landscapes of health in Stalinist Russia in her article Inventing the Subtropics: An Environmental History of Sochi, 1928-1936 (in: Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 16:1, 2015), and to Chris Pearson for Between Instinct and Intelligence: Harnessing Police Dog Agency in Early Twentieth-Century Paris (in: Comparative Studies in Society and History 58(2), 2016), a compelling and theoretically laden case study of the introduction of police dogs into the French police force, that reaches out to animal history with the help sociology and psychology.

The 2017 St Andrews Article Prize Committee consisted of Kati Lindström (chair; University of Tartu/ KTH Royal Institute of Technology), Peter Coates (University of Bristol) and Péter Szabó (Czech Academy of Sciences).

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Call for Submissions

The European Society for Environmental History (ESEH) welcomes submissions for the St Andrews Article Prize in European Environmental History.

The prize is intended to reward innovative and well-written article-length research in the field of the environmental history of Europe. It will be awarded to an article published in 2015 or 2016. Applications are welcomed from senior and junior scholars from all countries, though some preference may be given to junior scholars from Europe. Articles on any subject in European environmental history and in any European language are eligible for the award.

The winner will receive a monetary award in the amount of 500 Euro as well as travel grant (if needed) to attend the 9th ESEH Conference from 28 June to 2 July 2017 in Zagreb, Croatia. Applicants are asked to submit their published article (or book chapter that is to be read as a stand-alone work) by email as a PDF file to kati.lindstrom@ut.ee. If the language of publication is not English, applicants should include a one-page English summary.

We accept multi-author manuscripts but the nominations are limited to one article per main author. However, you can appear as a second or third author on other submissions. Please note that the financial award is a fixed amount, independently of the number of authors, and all the authors need to be notified of the submission. You can nominate articles by other authors but only on condition that the author is notified and agrees to the nomination.

Submissions must be received by 15 January 2017. The winner will be notified by the end of April 2017.

 

The St Andrews Article Prize in European Environmental History committee is composed of:

• Kati Lindström (chair; Department of Semiotics, University of Tartu)
• Peter Coates (Department of Historical Studies, University of Bristol)
• Péter Szabó (Institute of Botany, Czech Academy of Sciences)

Edit: This post has been modified on 13 October 2016 to reflect a clarification regarding the submission of multi-authored papers.