SMA awards: MASA Dissertation Award
In 2006, the Society for Medical Anthropology inaugurated the Medical Anthropology Students Association (MASA) to recognize and serve student members of the society. Students make up one-third of SMA’s membership and represent the future of the field. One way for SMA to honor its student members is through inauguration of an award recognizing the excellence of a recently completed doctoral dissertation. To that end, the SMA Executive Board is pleased to announce the establishment of the MASA Dissertation Award, created to recognize an outstanding dissertation in the field of medical anthropology, broadly defined.
The MASA Dissertation Award will be given on an annual basis to a scholar whose dissertation is judged to be the most significant and potentially influential contribution to medical anthropology. Dissertations will be judged on the basis of 1) scope and excellence of scholarship, including ethnographic research; 2) originality of subject matter; 3) effectiveness and persuasiveness of arguments; and 4) quality of the writing. Dissertation research of exceptional courage and difficulty will be given special consideration.
The MASA Dissertation Award will be publicly announced during the 2008 SMA awards ceremony, held during the annual AAA meeting. The winner will receive a $500 cash award and a plaque.
The MASA Dissertation Award Committee strongly encourages submission of nominations for the 2008 competition. Submissions must be dissertations approved, accepted, and filed as the final version with the candidate’s university within the calendar year 2007. The candidate’s dissertation advisor should attest that this is the copy submitted. Dissertations should be submitted with a title page that does not identify the author or his/her university affiliation, with all acknowledgment pages removed, and with any text or bibliographic references that would identify the author, advisors, or institutional affiliation removed. Dissertations with any identifying information will be disqualified from competition, which will entail a blind-review process.
Candidates for the award need not have received their PhD degrees in a department of anthropology, nor in a North American university. However, letters of nomination must state why the dissertation contributes to the field of medical anthropology. Two letters of nomination, one from the candidate’s dissertation advisor and one from a dissertation committee member, should be sent electronically as a word document to SMA Secretary Ellen Gruenbaum at elleng@csufresno.edu. A signed hard copy should be sent to Prof. Ellen Gruenbaum, Department of Anthropology, PB 16, California State University, Fresno, 5245 N. Backer Avenue, Fresno, CA 92740-8001. Please include full name, mailing address, and email address for both the nominator and dissertation author. Once received, SMA Secretary Gruenbaum will remove all identifiers and forward nomination letters to the judging committee.
A hard copy of the dissertation—neatly compiled but not necessarily bound, with all identifiers removed, and without a return address label—should be sent to the two North American judges as follows: Alan Harwood, Department of Anthropology, University of Massachusetts-Boston, Boston, MA 02125; and Carolyn Smith-Morris, Department of Anthropology, Southern Methodist University, Box 0336, Dallas, TX 75275-0336. A pdf version of the dissertation, with all identifiers removed, should be sent by email attachment to Ellen Gruenbaum (see above). She will forward the dissertation electronically to the international judge and chair, Lenore Manderson, in order to preserve anonymity.
All materials must be postmarked and emailed by the closing date of July 1, 2008. Any questions about the award or nomination process can be directed to SMA President Carolyn Sargent at csargent@mail.smu.edu.