EKM book and student paper prizes are approaching! Details below:
Call for Submissions 2009
Elli Köngäs-Maranda Prizes
American Folklore Society Women's Section
Each year, the Women's Section of the American Folklore Society awards two
prizes in honor of pioneering scholar Elli Köngäs-Maranda. The prizes
recognize superior work on women's traditional, vernacular, or local
culture and/or feminist theory and folklore.
Student Prize
- for an undergraduate or graduate student paper (up to 30 pages in
length)
- entrants must either be currently enrolled in a degree program as of the
submission deadline or have been enrolled in one during the 2008-2009
academic year
- carries an award of $100
- submission deadline is September 15, 2009
- may be submitted as either hard copy or (preferably) email attachment
Professional/Non-Student Prize
- eligible work includes: publications, films, videos, exhibitions or
exhibition catalogues, or sound recordings
- materials should have been published/produced no more than two years
prior to the submission deadline
- carries an award of $250
- submission deadline (postmarked) is September 1, 2009
- please submit three copies of books, videos, etc.
The awards will be announced at the American Folklore Society Annual
Meeting in Boise, ID October 21-25, 2009. Prize recipients need not be
members of the Society.
Please direct all submissions and questions to:
Sarah Catlin-Dupuy
2264 Country Lane
Columbia MO 65201
SarahCatlin-Dupuy@socket.net
573-875-5946
About Elli Köngäs-Maranda
Internationally renowned feminist folklorist Elli Kaija Köngäs-Maranda was
born in Finland in 1932. She studied Finnish folklore at the University of
Helsinki and did her doctoral dissertation at Indiana University (1963) on
Finnish-American folklore. She held various research positions, and taught
at the University of British Columbia (1970-1976) and at Laval University
from 1976 until her premature death in 1982. She was elected a Fellow of
the American Folklore Society in 1978. Academically, she was known for her
structural analysis of traditional culture, demonstrating precision and
mathematical intellect, but also for her eloquent writing. She published
extensively and in English, French, Finnish, German, and Russian. Her
feminism was particularly evident in her research and writing on the Lau
people, based on fieldwork conducted between 1966 and 1976. In 1983, the
American Folklore Society Women's section inaugurated two prizes in her
memory, one for student work and one for professional work, funded by
highly successful auctions, T-shirt sales, the making and raffling of a
quilt, and, most recently, the sale of note cards commemorating that
quilt.
Barbro Klein's obituary gives the most personal feminist view of Elli (see
Folklore Women's Communication, fall-winter 1983 (30-31):4-7). For an
example of Elli's work, see "The Roots of the Two Ethnologies, and
Ethnilogy. Folklore Forum 15 #1 (1982):51-58, at
. See also Felix J. Oinas, Elli Kaija
Köngäs Maranda: In Memoriam. Folklore Forum 15 #2 (1982):115-123, at
. A full bibliography of her work in
French and English (as well as several example studies, a longer
biography, and an introduction to her contributions to folkloristics) is
in Travaux et Inédits de Elli Kaija Köngäs Maranda, Cahiers du CELAT 1,
1983. A later consideration of Elli's intellectual contributions,
particularly her unusual uniting of fieldwork and structural analysis, can
be found in Leila K. Virtanen, "Folklorist Elli Kaija Köngäs Maranda: A
Passionate Rationalist in the Field." The Folklore Historian 17
(2000):34-41.