William T. Stearn Student Essay Prize 2016
The William T. Stearn Student Essay Prize has been instituted in honour of the late William T. Stearn, a scholar whose work contributed much to the field and to this Society.
The Society for the History of Natural History invites submissions to the 2016 William T. Stearn Student Essay Prize Competition. The prize will be awarded to the best original, unpublished, essay in the field of history of natural history. The submission deadline is 30 June 2016.
The competition is open to undergraduate and postgraduate students in full or part-time education. Entry is not limited to members of SHNH. Entries will be considered by a panel of three judges appointed by the Council of the Society. The winner will receive £300 and be offered membership of the Society for one year. The winning essay will normally be published in the Society’s journal Archives of natural history.
The Prize Rules and Entry Form are available for download as an Adobe Acrobat (PDF) files.
Entries must be prepared in conformity with the bibliographic conventions of Archives of natural history, in ‘Guidelines for Authors’. Essays have to be received by the closing date as hard-copy and on CD as stated in Prize Rules: it is not possible to send entries by email.
W. T. Stearn Essay Prize Winners
- 2015 Etienne Stockland. Patriotic natural history and sericultural natural reform in the French enlightenment.
- 2014 Matthew Holmes, University of Leeds, PhD student. The perfect pest: natural history & the red squirrel in nineteenth-century Scotland.
- 2012 Andrea Kennedy, University of Cambridge MPhil student 2011-12. The beauty of Victorian beasts: illustration in Rev. J.G. Wood’s Homes without Hands. Published in Archives of natural history 40 (2): 193-212. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/anh.2013.0168
- 2010 Nils Petter Hellström, who completed his M.Phil. in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge. The tree as evolutionary icon: Tania Kovats’s TREE in the Natural History Museum. Published in Archives of Natural History 38 (1): 1-17. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/anh.2011.0001
- 2009 Stephanie Pfennigwerth, School of English, Journalism and European Languages, University of Tasmania, Hobart, Australia. ‘The mighty cassowary’: the discovery and demise of the King Island emu. Published in Archives of Natural History 37 (1): 74-90. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/E0260954109001661
- 2008 Ross Brooks, Department of History, Oxford Brooks University, Oxford, UK. All too human: responses to same-sex copulation in the common cockchafer (Melolontha melolontha (L.), 1834-1900. Published in Archives of Natural History 36 (1): 146-159. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/E0260954108000703
- 2007 Heather Brink-Roby, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. Siren canora: the mermaid and the mythical in late nineteenth-century science. Published in Archives of Natural History 35 (1): 1-14. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/E0260954108000041