The National Women’s Studies Association and the University of Illinois Press are pleased to announce a competition for the best dissertation or first book manuscript by a single author in the field of women’s and gender studies. Applicants must be National Women’s Studies Association members. The application deadline is June 1 of each calendar year.

Possible topics may include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Activism
• Coloniality, postcoloniality and neo-imperialism
• Cultural production (media, film, music, literature)
• Feminist knowledge production
• Feminist pedagogy
• Feminist politics
• Feminist science and environmental studies
• Feminist theory
• Gender and disability
• Gender and globalization
• Gender and labor practices
• Gender and militarism
• Gender and queer sexuality
• Gender and violence
• Gendered experiences of people of color
• Girls studies
• Global and transnational feminisms
• Institutions and public policies
• Intersectionality
• Theories and practices of coalition
• Transgender studies
• Women of color feminisms

If a winner of the competition is selected, he or she will receive a publication contract with the University of Illinois Press and a $1,000 advance.

*****

The 2015 winner of the Book Prize is Erin L. Durban-Albrecht, who won for Postcolonial Homophobia: United States Imperialism in Haiti and the Transnational Circulation of Antigay Sexual Politics.

Previous winners include Erica Lorraine Williams’ Sex Tourism in Bahia: Ambiguous Entanglements (published 2013), Sophie Richter-Devroe’s manuscript How Women Do Politics: Peacebuilding, Resistance, and Survival in Palestine, Christina Holmes’ Ecological Borderlands: Decolonizing Body, Nature, and Spirit in Chicana Feminism (due for publication in Fall of 2016), and  Ethel Tungohan’s, Migrant Care Worker Activism in Canada.

For complete details visit http://www.nwsa.org/firstbookprize.