Call for Submissions—Deadline August 1, 2018 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 workon 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 August 1, 2018

The awards will be announced at the American Folklore Society Annual Meeting in Buffalo, NY, October 17–20, 2018. Prize recipients need not be members of the Society.

Please direct all submissions and questions to:

Kristina Downs

3401 N. Stoneycrest Rd.

Bloomington, IN 47405

kgdowns@indiana.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.