The Women's Section of AFS Is Accepting Submissions for the 2017 Elli Köngäs-Maranda Professional Prize

Call for Submissions—Deadline July 31, 2017
Elli Köngäs-Maranda Prize
American Folklore Society, Women’s Section

The Women’s Section of the American Folklore Society awards an annual professional prize in honor of pioneering scholar Elli Köngäs-Maranda. The prize recognizes exemplary or innovative work on women’s traditional, vernacular, or local culture and/or feminist theory and folklore.

Eligible works include books, films, videos, exhibitions or exhibition catalogues, and sound recordings
Materials should have been published/produced no more than two years prior to the submission deadline
The EKM Professional Prize carries a cash award of $250
Please submit three copies of books, videos, etc., postmarked by July 31, 2017

The awards will be announced at the American Folklore Society Annual Meeting in Minneapolis, MN, October 18–21, 2017. Prize recipients need not be members of the Society.

Please direct all submissions and questions to:

Victoria Harkavy
c/o CiS
9812 Falls Road #114-#146
Potomac, MD 20854

vharkavy@masonlive.gmu.edu

About Elli Köngäs-Maranda

Internationally renowned feminist folklorist Elli Kaija Köngäs-Maranda was born in Finland in 1932. She studied Finnish folklore at the University of Helsinki and did her doctoral dissertation at Indiana University (1963) on Finnish-American folklore. She held various research positions, and taught at the University of British Columbia (1970–1976) and at Laval University from 1976 until her premature death on November 1, 1982. She was elected a Fellow of the American Folklore Society in 1978. Academically, she was known for her structural analysis of traditional culture, demonstrating precision and mathematical intellect, but also for her eloquent writing. She published extensively and in English, French, Finnish, German, and Russian. Her feminism was particularly evident in her research and writing on the Lau people, based on fieldwork conducted between 1966 and 1976. In 1983, the American Folklore Society Women’s section inaugurated two prizes in her memory, one for student work and one for professional work, funded by highly successful auctions, T-shirt sales, the making and raffling of a quilt, and, most recently, the sale of note cards commemorating that quilt. For more information about Elli Köngäs-Maranda, see Felix J. Oinas, “Elli Kaija Köngäs Maranda: In Memoriam.” Folklore Forum 15 #2 (1982): 115–123.