Two prizes of $100 each will be awarded this year: one to an undergraduate and one to a graduate student from the Southeastern region of the United States for a study of an Asian topic. Papers may be from any discipline or may be inter-disciplinary, but must deal with Asia—here defined as the Indian subcontinent (including Afghanistan), Sri Lanka, and Southeast, East and Central Asia. The winning graduate paper from the SEC will be entered into competition for a panel of graduate papers from the eight AAS regionals at the 2019 annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies.
Participants in the contest may be either undergraduate or resident graduate students at institutions in the Southeast. The Southeast Region consists of the District of Columbia, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, Tennessee, Kentucky, and West Virginia.
Participants should have a letter of endorsement sent by a major professor, thesis advisor, department chair, or other appropriate person. A faculty member may endorse multiple papers. All papers written between September 1, 2016 and August 31, 2017 are eligible for submission. Participants must submit the finished word processed papers to either Catherine Phipps (graduate) or Jing Zhang (undergraduate), whose addresses are below, no later than November 30, 2017.
Graduate participants are also encouraged to submit the proposed paper for possible inclusion on the SEC’s annual meeting to be held on January 12-14, 2018 at the University of South Carolina, Columbia. The program deadline is November 15. In addition, papers proposed by graduate students for the SEC conference at the University of South Carolina in 2018 will be eligible for the competition, if also submitted to Professor Phipps by November 30, 2017.
The finished paper should be no longer than 25 double-spaced pages, exclusive of footnotes and bibliography. Papers will be judged on the merits of research, the clarity of the argument, and the quality of the writing. Works previously published are not eligible for the competition.
Participants must include their name, address, phone number, school, whether undergraduate or graduate, and the name of the recommending professor on the title page.
Papers will be read by a panel of judges, and prizes will be announced at the Annual Business Meeting during the SEC/AAS Conference. The winning papers will be considered for publication by the Conference in the annual Southeast Review of Asian Studies.
To submit papers or for further information about the competition, please contact:
For Graduate Papers
Dr. Catherine Phipps
Dept. of History, University of Memphis
cphipps1@memphis.edu
For Undergraduate Papers
Dr. Jing Zhang
Humanities, New College of Florida
jzhang@ncf.edu