Category Archives: Funding & Awards

2016 Cheiron Book Prize

LambFrom the Executive Officer David K. Robinson of Cheiron (International Society for the History of Behavioural and Social Sciences):

In acknowledgment of the book’s exceptional contributions to our understanding of Adolf Meyer and the field he singularly shaped, Cheiron awards the 2016 Book Prize to Susan D. Lamb (U. Ottawa) for Pathologist of the Mind: Adolf Meyer and the Origins of American Psychiatry, published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 2014.

After becoming the first psychiatrist-in-chief at Johns Hopkins Hospital in 1908, Meyer devoted himself over the next five decades to the scientific acceptance of psychiatry as a methodologically sound specialty of medicine. Although historians of psychiatry have recognized Meyer as a founding father, many of his ideas were not well understood, and his highly influential impact on psychiatry has been partially shrouded in mystery. Having gained access to previously sealed patient records as well as Meyer’s personal correspondence, and having offered such a careful and thoughtful analysis of these precious archival materials, Lamb provides historians of the behavioral and social sciences with a coveted window into Meyer’s thinking and decision making.

Pathologist of the Mind clarifies Meyerian notions of psychobiology, psychotherapy, and evolutionary theory (among others) and places this important figure, as well as the hospital and area of specialty to which he was dedicated, into historical context. In impressively detailed fashion, the book brings the man and the era to life.

Our congratulations to Dr. Lamb! Find out more about her work here.

And find the winning volume here.

Neuro History Grants @ Osler Library

osler-accessAnna Dysert, Assistant Head Librarian at MCGill University’s Osler Library of the History of Medicine in Montreal made an announcement on HNet for two research travel grants to be allocated during May 2016-April 2017.

The Mary Louise Nickerson Fellowship in Neuro History carries a value of up to $10, 000 Canadian, and the  Dimitrije Pivnicki Award in Neuro History and History of Psychiatry  up to $4,000.

Both are intended to “allow scholars to carry out research with the rich neuro history archival and artifact collections of the library, the centrepiece of which is the Wilder Penfield Fonds, and other relevant collections at the Montreal Neurological Institute and the McGill University Archives.”

Submissions are welcomed from a variety of individuals, including graduate students, scholars, and professionals. The deadline for both is March 1st.

Follow the links above for more detailed information. Find their Archives website here.

 

Bandura Wins National Medal of Science

Albert Bandura

Longtime Stanford psychologist Albert Bandura has won the prestigious National Medal of Science in the US. Bandura is best known for his studies of the effects television violence on children, published in the 1960s, in which children were shown a film of an adult beating up a “Bobo Doll,” and the were placed in a room with the same to doll to see what they would do. Many of the children re-enacted the violent behaviour that had been modelled by the adult on the film. The phenomenon was elaborated by Bandura into Social Learning Theory.

Bandura is a Canadian, born in Alberta. He attended the University of British Columbia for his BA, before moving to the University of Iowa for graduate study. He has been a professor at Stanford since 1953.

The APS announcement of Bandura’s award can be found here.

AHA Online Calendar

FYI, the American Historical Association’s website includes a handy dandy calendar tool that provides a chronology of wide-ranging relevant content for those interested in the happenings of the historical discipline more broadly. Included are meetings and seminars, exhibitions and interpretive resources, as well as awards and fellowships.

Follow this link to check it out!

Call for Submissions: 2016 Cheiron Book Prize, Deadline Oct. 15

Cheiron, the International Society for the History of the Behavioral and Social Sciences, is currently calling for submissions for the 2016 Cheiron Book Prize. The deadline for submissions has been extended by two weeks; books must now be received by October 15, 2015. The prize will be awarded at 2016 Annual Meeting of Cheiron in Barcelona, Spain.  Full details follow below.

2016 Cheiron BOOK PRIZE

Beginning in 2004, Cheiron: The International Society for the History of Behavioral and Social Sciences has awarded the Cheiron Book Prize biennially for an outstanding monograph in the history of the social/behavioral/human sciences. For more on Cheiron, including past Book Prize winners, see https://www.uakron.edu/cheiron/

Eligible works for the 2016 Cheiron Book Prize include original book-length historical studies, written in English and published in 2013, 2014, or 2015. Topical areas can include, but are not limited to, histories of psychology, psychiatry, anthropology, sociology, and social statistics. Works that are primarily history of medicine or history of education are not suitable entries, unless they are strongly tied to the history of the social/behavioral/human sciences. Edited collections or anthologies are not eligible, nor are conventional textbooks. Submissions will be judged on the basis of their scholarly character, depth of research, and the importance of their contribution to the field. Submissions can be made by publishers or authors.

Deadline: Two copies of each entry must be received by the committee chair (address below) by October 15, 2015. Books that are released later in 2015 can be eligible for the next competition; only printed books are eligible.

The author of the winning book will receive $500 plus up to $300 in travel expenses to attend the 2016 Annual Meeting of Cheiron in Barcelona, Spain, where the prize will be awarded. Remote-electronic presentation may be arranged, if possible, for a winner who cannot make the meeting. Announcement of the award will be widely circulated to relevant journals and organizations.

To enter the competition, two copies of each entry, clearly labeled “2016 Cheiron Book Prize,” must be mailed directly to the committee chair:
Phyllis Wentworth
27 Tanager Street
Arlington, MA  02476
Email: wentworthp@wit.edu

Sept 1: Grad student grant deadline for $2,500

THEN/HiER, the first pan-Canadian organization devoted to promoting and improving history teaching and learning, will give up to $2,500 to support a collaborative project bringing together some of the multiple and varied constituencies involved in history education.

Our goal is to stimulate an active, participatory dialogue among these various communities of history educators, a dialogue that explores how best to improve history education in all its forms through more research-informed practice (from kindergarten to graduate school) and more practice-informed research.

Their aim is to fund knowledge mobilization and dissemination, rather than new research. The next deadline is September 1. (And, after that, November 1.)

Details regarding graduate student projects can be found here; regarding open small grants, which require matching funds or in-kind contributions, here.

Funding and Fellowship Opportunities

Money TreeThe National Humanities Alliance has posted two news items that may be of interest to AHP readers.

Ph.D. candidates with approved dissertation topics, and recent Ph.D. graduates (within 5 years) who are looking to add social and political context to their historical projects, may find this Fellowship opportunity interesting: the National Archives is offering a summer research fellowship starting in July 2011. With an accompanying $10,000 stipend, this is an excellent opportunity for researchers and historians to gain access to these archives, to its staff, and to consultants from the House and Senate history offices.

Suggested research topics include: immigration policy, committee histories, environmental policy, Congressional investigations, or eighteenth and nineteenth century petitions to Congress. However, any topic using the historical records of Congress housed at the National Archives’ Centre for Legislative Archives will be considered. Follow this link for more information.

Secondly, The National Humanities Alliance has posted a list of funding opportunities for humanities and social science projects.

Of note are the Digging into Data challenge, where researchers create international (Canada, US, UK, Netherlands) teams to develop new means of searching through and analyzing the large amounts of data and databases now used by humanities and social science scholars.

American archivists may also be interested in this Publishing Historical Records Grant, which provides support for projects requiring between $20,000 and $4,000,000. The National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC), which is a part of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), supports this opportunity to promote and preserve American documents “essential to understanding our democracy, history, and culture.”

CFP for funded neuroskeptic workshop in Berlin

MPI-BerlinThe Max-Planck-Institute for the History of Science is hosting a “neuro-reality check” workshop to be held in Berlin in December. Their purpose is to scrutinize “the ‘neuro-turn’ in the humanities and natural sciences.” But they also aim to look beyond the usual pro and con.

Our ambition is to take problematisations of the neurosciences to another level. While numerous new scholarly projects in the social sciences and humanities have recently emerged to analyze the growth of ‘neuromania’, our workshop aims to bring together scholars from a diversity of disciplinary backgrounds in order to step back a little, and to probe deeper into the alleged effects and actual causes of the ongoing neurohype. This will include exploring the extent to which discourses engendering neuroscience in fact do match neuroscience’s real world (social) effects; but it will also include interrogating the anatomy of the neuro-discourses themselves, and to locate the immense attractions and functions of the ‘neuro’ in the broader scheme of — intellectual and political — things: the promise and attractions of ‘interdisciplinarity’ within contemporary humanities; the surge of underlabouring specialities such as neuroethics; or the rise and growing acceptance, within recent years, of a new (neuro) ‘biologism’ in a great many academic disciplines and popular culture at large, as well as the opposition this engenders.

For successful applicants, MPI will cover the cost of travel and accommodation in Berlin. Continue reading CFP for funded neuroskeptic workshop in Berlin

CFP for funded neurohistory workshop in Munich

Smail's bookThe Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society is sponsoring a workshop on neurohistory to be held in Munich in June. Broadly speaking, they are calling for papers to engage the following theme: “How can neuroscience help us understand the past?”

This interest follows Daniel Lord Smail‘s book of 2008, On deep history and the brain, which asked questions about when “history” ought to be conceived as having begun and also appealed to the brain as a way to reach behind the texts that typically inform historical research. This new workshop follows his lead:

  1. What ideas and methods have neuroscientists developed that historians can use to shed a new light on the past (and vice versa)?
  2. What new research questions can neuroscience suggest for historians (and vice versa)?
  3. What are the biggest challenges in developing neurohistory as a field, and how can they be overcome?
  4. How might neurohistory shed light on the interaction between people and their environment, in both the past and the present?

For those interested, the organizers are asking for participants to pre-circulate a short (1000 word) position paper, participate in a two-day workshop (6-7 June 2011), and then revise their paper for publication (in Rachel Carson Center Perspectives). Continue reading CFP for funded neurohistory workshop in Munich

Hacking wins Norway’s Holberg Prize

The Holberg International Memorial Prize for 2009 for outstanding scholarly work in the arts and humanities, social sciences, law and theology has been awarded to Ian Hacking.

Ian Hacking (born in 1936 in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada) is one of the world’s leading scholars in the fields of philosophy and history of science. He has made important contributions to areas as diverse as the philosophy and history of physics; the understanding of the concept of probability; the philosophy of language; and the philosophy and history of psychology and psychiatry. In spite of this diversity there is one regulative idea that pervades all his work: Science is a human enterprise. It is always created in a historical situation, and to understand why present science is as it is, it is not sufficient to know that it is “true”, or confirmed. We have to know the historical context of its emergence.

The award citation expands on what it was that caught the committee’s specific attention.

His combination of rigorous philosophical and historical analysis has profoundly altered our understanding of the ways in which key concepts emerge through scientific practices and in specific social and institutional contexts. His work lays bare the normative and social implications of the natural and the social sciences.

The €500,000 prize, which is awarded annually, was established by the Norwegian Parliament in 2003. Past recipients include Julia Kristeva and Jürgen Habermas. Nominations for the 2010 award, which can be submitted online, must be received by 12 October 2009.

A recent interview with Hacking can be found here; an updated biography here.