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A section of the American Anthropological Association

SMA awards: Ellen Basker Memorial Prize

  • Deadline: July 1, awarded every year

The SMA welcomes nominations for the Eileen Basker Memorial Prize, awarded annually for a significant contribution to scholarship on gender and health by scholars from any discipline or nation, for a specific book, article, film, or exceptional PhD thesis produced within the preceding three years. Winners receive a $500-$1000 cash award and are recognized at the SMA business meeting during the AAA.

The Basker Prize is awarded to the work judged to be the most courageous, significant, and potentially influential contribution to scholarship in the area of gender and health.

Nominations are invited from one or more individuals in the form of a letter indicating the impact of the particular work on the field. Self-nomination is not permitted. Publishers of nominated books are expected to supply three copies of the relevant work to the Prize Committee.

Enquiries and nominations for the award should be sent to the chair of the Basker Prize Committee:

Juliet McMullin - juliet.mcmullin@ucr.edu
Dept. of Anthropology
900 University Ave
University of California-Riverside
Riverside, CA 92521

Past Years Winners

  • 2011: Leslie Reagan, Dangerous Pregnancies: Mothers, Disabilities, and Abortion in Modern America & Ida Susser, AIDS, Sex and Culture: Global Politics and Survival in Southern Africa
  • 2010: Elly Teman - Birthing a Mother: The Surrogate Body and the Pregnant Self.
  • 2009: Janelle Taylor (2008) The Public Life of the Fetal Sonogram: Technology, Consumption, and the Politics of Reproduction, Rutgers University Press.
  • The 2008 Prize went to Matthew Gutmann (2007) Fixing Men: Sex, Birth Control, and AIDS in Mexico. University of California Press, and Kathy Davis (2007) The Making of Our Bodies, Ourselves: How Feminism Travels Across Border. Duke University Press
  • The 2007 Prize went to Sophie Day for for On the Game.
  • The 2006 Prize went to Michele Rivkin-Fish for Women's Health in Post-Soviet Russia: The Politics of Intervention (Indiana University Press 2005).
  • The 2005 Prize was awarded to Joao Biehl for his book Vita: Life in a zone of social abandonment (University of California Press, 2005).
  • The 2004 Prize went to Sandra Morgen for her book Into our own hands: The women’s health movement in the United States, 1969-1990 (Rutgers University Press, 2002).
  • The 2003 Prize was shared by Caroline Bledsoe and Fatoumatta Banja for Contingent Lives: Fertility, Time, and Aging in West Africa Africa (The University of Chicago Press, 2002).
  • Other previous winners include: Rhoda Kanaaneh for Birthing the Nation; Susan Kahn for Reproducing Jews; Gelya Frank for Venus on Wheels; Adele Clarke for Disciplining Reproduction; Rayna Rapp for Testing Women, Testing the Fetus; Nancy Scheper-Hughes for Death Without Weeping; Margarete Sandelowski for With Child in Mind; Barbara Duden for The Woman Beneath the Skin; Margaret Lock for Encounters with Aging; Marcia Inhorn for The Quest for Conception; Paul Farmer, Margaret Connors, Janie Simmons, and others for Women, Poverty and AIDS; Faye Ginsburg for Contested Lives; Joan Jacobs Brumberg for Fasting Girls; and Emily Martin for Woman in the Body.