Monday, March 12, 2007

Call for Preyer Award Submissions from Junior Scholars in Legal History

The Kathryn T. Preyer Memorial Committee of the American Society for Legal History invites submissions for the Kathryn T. Preyer Scholars Competition.

Named after the late Kathryn T. Preyer, a distinguished historian of the law of early America known for her generosity to young legal historians, the program of Kathryn T. Preyer Scholars is designed to help legal historians at the beginning of their careers. At the annual meeting of the Society two younger legal historians designated Kathryn T. Preyer Scholars will present what would normally be their first papers to the Society. (Whether there is a Kathryn T. Preyer Memorial Panel at the meeting, as there was this year, or whether the Preyer Scholars present their papers as part of other panel depends on the subject-matter of the winning papers and on what is on the rest of the program.) The generosity of Professor Preyer's friends and family has enabled the Society to offer a small honorarium to the Preyer Scholars and to reimburse, in some measure or entirely, their costs of attending the meeting.

The two winners of the competition will be named Kathryn T. Preyer Scholars. Each will present the paper that he or she submitted to the competition at the Society's annual meeting in Tempe on October 25-28, 2007. Kathryn T. Preyer Scholars will receive a $250 cash award and reimbursement of expenses up to $750 for travel, hotels, and meals.

Submissions are welcome on any legal, institutional and/or constitutional aspect of American history and the history of the Atlantic World. Graduate students, law students, and other early-career scholars who have presented no more than two papers at a national conference are eligible to apply. Papers already submitted to the ASLH Program Committee, whether or not accepted for an existing panel, and papers never submitted are all equally eligible for the competition.

Submissions should include a curriculum vitae of the author, contact information, and a complete draft of the paper to be presented. The draft may be longer than could be presented in the time available at the meeting (twenty minutes) and should contain supporting documentation, but one of the criteria for selection will be the suitability of the paper for reduction to a twenty-minute oral presentation. The deadline for submission is June 15, 2007. The Preyer Scholars will be named by August 1.

Please send electronic submissions to the chair of the Preyer Commitee, Laura Kalman (kalman@history.ucsb.edu), and she will forward them to the other committee members.

Committee members include: Laura Kalman, Chair, University of California, Santa Barbara; Lyndsay Campbell, University of California, Berkeley; Christine Desan, Harvard University; Sarah Barringer Gordon, University of Pennsylvania; David Konig, Washington University in St. Louis.