BFE Student Prize

The BFE Student Prize is awarded each year for the best student presentation at the BFE Annual Conference. The initiative is designed to recognise the research and creativity of student members of our scholarly community. To be eligible for next year’s prize, you will need be a presenter at the 2025 BFE Annual Conference, and you must be a 2025 BFE member.


2024 Competition

Following the BFE Annual Conference at University College Cork, April 2024, the BFE Student Prize panel have decided to award the student prize to Rose Campion and Sheyda Ghavami’s - ‘Whose Knowledge, Whose Production?: Experiences from Co-produced Research on Kurdish Singers in Europe’, with an honourable mention for Jim Hickson’s ‘Micro-Organology of a One-String Fiddle’. 

Campion and Ghavami

This was a challenging and provocative paper on co-produced research that speaks to current attempts to decolonise ethnomusicology. The paper engages well with relevant scholarship and issues in ethnographic methods. The panel was particularly impressed by the creative presentation style and how it reified the complicated power dynamics between researcher and the researched. 

Hickson 

A stylishly written paper about a one-string fiddle that starts in the Pitt Rivers Museum, then takes the reader on a fascinating and tangled journey that crisscrosses colonial Africa and Europe. The panel was impressed by the paper’s wide-ranging source material and its interdisciplinary focus, combining instrument history and museum studies.

Many thanks to our prize panel: Lyndsey Copeland, Áine Ryan Mangaoang and Stephen Millar (chair)


Previous winners of the BFE Student Prize:

2023    Ivan Mouraviev (Honourable Mentions to Pantea Armanfar and María del Mar Ocaña Guzmán)
2022    Caetano Maschio Santos (Honourable Mention to Rowan Hawitt)
2021    Dunya Habash
2020    [Annual Conference postponed - no competition]
2019    Vicky Tadros
2017    Hamidreza Salehyar
2016    Esbjörn Wettermark
2015    Cassandre Balosso-Bardin, Deirdre Morgan (joint winners)
2014    Jennifer McCallum
2013    Thomas Western
2012    Joe Browning
2011    Emma Brinkhurst
2010    Stefanie Conn
2009    Sue Miller
2008    Ioannis Tsioulakis