BFE Student Prize 2018

Submissions are invited for the BFE Student Prize that is awarded annually for the best student paper presented at the BFE annual conference. All students who are presenting papers at the BFE conference at the University of Newcastle (12-15 April 2018) are strongly encouraged to submit their papers for consideration. Only papers from students who are BFE members are eligible. This initiative is designed to support and recognise the work of student members of our scholarly community. The papers will be reviewed by a BFE student prize panel. Current submission guidelines can be found at the foot of this page.

Please note that your paper should not be significantly revised prior to submission. The text should be as for your 20-minute presentation and should not be more than 3000 words. Please do not submit a longer version of your paper as submissions that are clearly over length will be disregarded. If it is important for audio or audiovisual materials to be considered with the text of your paper, please include web links to these materials (on youtube, vimeo etc.), along with any necessary passwords to access links if they are private. Powerpoint or other presentation slides should not be included, though important images from slides can be incorporated into the body of the paper.

Papers should be sent as a PDF, Word or RTF attachment to the chair of the student prize panel Dr Fiorella Montero Diaz: r.montero.diazkeele.ac.uk

The deadline for submissions to the 2018 competition is midnight Monday 23 April 2018 and the result will be announced by the end of May.

BFE Student Prize Winner 2017:

The BFE Student Prize for 2017 recognises an outstanding paper presented by a student at this year’s BFE Annual Conference, hosted by the University of Sheffield (20-23 April 2017). We are delighted to award this year's prize to Hamidreza Salehyar of University of Toronto, and to give honourable mention to Lyndsey Hoh of Oxford University: their outstanding papers are described below. We would also like to thank everyone who submitted a paper this year, and encourage students to submit papers for next year’s conference at the University of Newcastle in 2018.

Beyond Resistance and Subordination: The Paradox of Popular Music in Shi’ite Rituals in Post-Revolutionary Iran - Hamidreza Salehyar

This well-written and convincingly-argued analysis of Shi’a Muharram mourning rituals examines the controversial spaces where popular music influences religious life. Using clear language to convey complex ideas, the author articulates a dialectical, rather than binary approach to religion, politic ideologies  and popular culture. It is a valuable contribution to the discipline as a troubling of scholarly hierarchies of the religious and the popular, and will be a useful resource to anyone studying contemporary Islam.

Brass Instruments in Benin and Experiences of the Historical - Lyndsey Hoh

This sophisticated and compelling paper examines the multiple cultural meanings of brass instruments in post-colonial Africa. Based on a phenomenological approach and extensive ethnographic evidence from interviews, the author makes the case that these instruments hold unique value in Benin. Arguing that brass instruments constitute “entangled objects” (Thomas 1991) and “imperial degree” (Stoler 2013), the paper is an innovative and original contribution to organology.

Former winners of the BFE Student Prize: