Best Article Prize

The editors of the Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies and Routledge are delighted to offer a $500 prize for the most outstanding article published in the journal each year.

All articles published in JMIS will automatically be considered for the Best Article Prize, and all submissions received during each calendar year will be considered for publication in the following year.

Call for Papers

The Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies (JMIS) is a new interdisciplinary journal for innovative scholarship on the multiple languages, cultures, and historical processes of the Iberian Peninsula, and the zones with which it was in contact. Recognizing the vitality of debates about change in the fourth and fifth centuries, and conscious of the artificiality of the boundaries associated with 1492, we encourage submission of all innovative scholarship of interest to the community of medievalists and Iberianists. JMIS, which brings theoretically informed approaches into creative contact with more empirically minded scholarship, encompasses archaeology, art and architecture, music, philosophy and religious studies, as well as history, codicology, manuscript studies and the multiple Arabic, Latin, Romance, and Hebrew linguistic and literary traditions of Iberia. We welcome work that engages peninsular Iberia in relation to other parts of the ‘post-classical’ world; which explores links of colonization and exchange with the Maghreb, embraces the study of Occitania, addresses Iberia’s presence in the Mediterranean, or adopts a transatlantic or Latin American frame. We also encourage interdisciplinary work combining radically different forms of sources or theoretical proposals, and ‘unconventional’ types of submissions including brief opinion pieces or archival reports, individual or clustered interviews with prominent scholars, audio clips, ‘podcasts’, and video files.

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Submissions for consideration must be prepared in Chicago ‘humanities’ style, and should not exceed 10,000 words; shorter pieces, and non-traditional submissions, are welcomed. Submissions in English are preferred; however, submissions in other languages may be accepted at the discretion of the editors. For the full instructions for authors, click here.

To submit papers, please visit our site for on-line submission.

Editorial information

• Editor: Therese Martin (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Madrid, Spain)

The winner of the 2018 article prize is “Rejecting al-Andalus, exalting the Reconquista: historical memory in contemporary Spain,” by Alejandro García Sanjuán.  

The selection committee unanimously judged “Rejecting al-Andalus, Exalting the Reconquista: Historical Memory in Contemporary Spain,” as the outstanding article of 2018.” In this article, Alejandro García-Sanjuán analyzes the construction of historiographical and popular visions of al-Andalus as alien to Spanish identity and represented through historical tropes like “Reconquest/Reconquista.” García-Sanjuán traces the genealogy of a triumphalist history that was championed during Franco’s Nationalist-Catholic dictatorship (1939–75). Although the nationalistic view of Spanish history as one of Reconquista has been in decline since Spain’s transition to democracy, it has never been fully discredited, and has been revived for populist ends by certain political parties in recent years. The breadth of this investigation, which examines a complex topic over the longue durée of the Middle Ages to today, cements its relevance for medievalists and scholars of modern politics, nationalism, and identity. This makes it a worthy winner of the 2018 prize. 

The committee also gives honorable mentions to two articles, you can browse all the articles below.

Selection committee (JMIS Advisory Board Members):

Michael Kulikowski, Pennsylvania State University

Alicia Miguélez, Universidade Nova de Lisboa

Núria Silleras-Fernández, University of Colorado, Boulder (Chair)