Routledge Area Studies
Impact & Interdisciplinarity Awards
Celebrating Area Studies research, the Impact and Interdisciplinarity awards are each worth £2,500 and are awarded annually in November.
The Routledge Area Studies Awards in Impact and Interdisciplinarity, worth £5,000 (two awards of £2,500 each), are presented annually for original research which showcases the unique strengths of Area Studies, its special applicability in real-world contexts, and position at the interface of multiple disciplines. They celebrate research which makes a significant contribution to our understanding of ‘areas’ of our world and the lives lived therein.
The awards are conferred by an expert panel of Area Studies scholars, in partnership with Routledge, the world’s leading academic publisher in Area Studies, and the Humanities and Social Sciences broadly. Routledge publishes thousands of books and journals each year, serving scholars, instructors, and professional communities worldwide.
Our vision is that the awards will support those working in Area Studies and foster collaboration between teams working on different projects, in different institutions, in different countries, and in different traditions, globally, as is befitting of the field.
> Submissions are welcome from all specialisms, backgrounds, and locations. We particularly welcome applications from scholars based in the Global South; applicants who have no permanent academic affiliation are also eligible.
> For the purposes of these awards, Area Studies is defined as research rooted in the Humanities and Social Sciences and that is very attentive to specific national contexts, histories, languages and cultures.
> Routledge and the judging panel acknowledge that impact can be defined in different ways by different communities and individuals. For the purposes of the Impact Award, impact is defined as research that has tangibly contributed to, benefitted and influenced the economy, society, culture, public policy or services, health, the environment or quality of life, beyond academia. See last year’s Impact Award winning project for an example.
> The research should be original.
> At least one substantive original journal article presenting the research needs to have been published or accepted for publication.
> If multiple journal articles have resulted from the research project, submit your strongest or most relevant article.
> The journal article presenting the research must have undergone a form of peer review appropriate to the research (single-anonymous, double-anonymous, open, etc.)
> The peer-reviewed journal article presenting the research should have been published, or accepted for publication, in an academic journal no more than five years prior to submission for the award.
> The research does not need to have been published in English; however, a translation of the submission will be required by the judging panel.
> Applications for the Interdisciplinarity Award must showcase research that has a genuinely inter-, multi-, or trans-disciplinary approach.
• Applicants may nominate their research for either the impact or the interdisciplinarity prize, but not both.
• The awards will be judged by a panel of experts and advisers appointed by the Routledge, Taylor & Francis Area Studies team.
• Previous winners are not eligible for entry in successive years.
• Previously submitted research projects are not eligible for resubmission again, neither in the same form, nor a revised form.
• Applications will be not be considered if the nomination form submitted is incomplete, the copy of the peer reviewed journal article is missing (including a translation if published in a language other than English), evidence to support the submission is missing, or the corresponding applicant’s CV is missing. Applicants will not be contacted if any items are found to be missing.
• Applications will not be considered if more than five pieces of evidence (excluding the peer reviewed journal article) have been submitted.
• Applications will not be considered if they do not meet the definition of Area Studies stated under the criteria for eligibility.
• Applications for the Impact Awards will not be considered if they do not meet the definition of impact stated under the criteria for eligibility.
• A substantive original research article needs to have been published in a peer reviewed journal; a book or book chapter alone is ineligible.
• The judges’ decision will be final, and no correspondence will be entered into.
• Should there be a tie in judging, an award may be awarded to joint winners, with the prize money divided equally.
• Winning and shortlisted applicants will be contacted in November 2023. Applicants who have not been shortlisted will not be contacted.
• Should no applications be deemed suitable, the awards will not be awarded.
• The award winners should be willing to provide a photograph of themselves and to participate in relevant promotional coverage which may be undertaken by Routledge, Taylor & Francis.
• Any personal information provided will be handled and stored in adherence with the Informa privacy policy.
• Payment will be made where possible and in keeping with Taylor & Francis Informa compliance requirements. The payment will be paid in the currency of the bank account held by the winner(s), converted at the Informa treasury rate for that year.
• If the winning research is published or has been accepted for publication in a Routledge, Taylor & Francis journal, free access will be put in place for one year for the associated article(s).
Applications for the 2023 awards are open until 31st May 2023, with winners to be announced in November 2023. Information about the 2022 winners and shortlisted projects can be found here.
The nomination form can be found below. Please note, the following should be attached to an email before sending:
Completed application form
CV of the corresponding applicant
A copy of one peer-reviewed journal article presenting the research
A translation of the peer-reviewed article if the original article is not in English
A maximum of five pieces of written, visual or statistical evidence to support your submission (excluding the peer-reviewed journal article). Where possible, one Word document containing links to the pieces of evidence should be provided instead of separate attachments. Evidence may include, but is not limited to: Altmetric or other social media data, audio or video recordings, blog posts, book reviews, citation or usage data, curricula, finance reports, infographics, leaflets, letters, museum or gallery exhibition reports, performance reviews, photos, policy briefs, posters, regulation and standards documentation, statistics, surveys, testimonials, tweets, UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) relevance, and web forum discussions.
Any queries about the prize or the application process may be directed to [email protected].
David Lees
David Lees is an Associate Professor of French at the University of Warwick, UK. He is a specialist in aspects of modern and contemporary French culture, history and politics, particularly film propaganda in the twentieth century and the political campaigns of the centre and extreme-right in the twenty-first century. David is Co-Editor of the journal Modern & Contemporary France.
Jane Hindley
Jane Hindley is a comparative political sociologist and is the Deputy Director of the Interdisciplinary Studies Centre at the University of Essex. She works on social movements, sustainability, and climate change and is also interested in radical pedagogies and the history of radical thought.
Gregorio Alonso
Gregorio Alonso is an Associate Professor of Hispanic History at the University of Leeds and the Editor of the Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies. His research interests range from the study of political and religious conflicts in Modern Europe and Latin America to the making of the liberal and the Catholic traditions during the Nineteenth Century.
Matthias Neumann
Matthias Neumann is Senior Lecturer in Modern Russian History at the University of East Anglia, UK. He has published widely on the history of childhood and youth in revolutionary Russia and is the President of the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies (BASEES).
*Please note, we are still confirming our judging panel for the 2023 Awards cycle.*
Godwin Siundu
Godwin Siundu is founding co-editor of Eastern African Literary & Cultural Studies. He researches in postcolonial discourses, focusing on the literary and cultural works of South Asian diasporic experiences in eastern Africa and North America. Siundu has published some of his articles in Research in African Literatures, Journal of African Cultural Studies, African Identities, English Studies in Africa, and the Publication of the Modern Languages Association (PMLA), among others. Siundu is currently a senior lecturer in the Department of Literature, University of Nairobi.
Susan Hodgett
Susan Hodgett is the founding Professor of Area Studies at the University of East Anglia. She was Principal Investigator of the UK AHRC’s Blurring Genres Network: Recovering the Humanities for Political Science and Area Studies to 2018. Susan served as: Chair of the 2021 UK REF Sub-panel 25, Area Studies; President of the UK Council for Area Studies Associations (2011-14); President of the International Council for Canadian Studies (2014-16); and President of the British Association for Canadian Studies (2008-11). Her recent books on the future of Area Studies are Necessary Travel: New Area Studies and Canada in Comparative Perspective (2018, with Patrick James, Lexington Press) and What Political Science Can Learn from the Humanities: Blurring Genres (2021, with RAW Rhodes, Palgrave).
Eswaran Sridharan
Eswaran Sridharan is the Academic Director and Chief Executive of the University of Pennsylvania Institute for the Advanced Study of India (UPIASI) in New Delhi. He is the author, editor or co-editor of ten books and has published 90 academic articles in scholarly journals and as chapters in edited volumes. His current research interests include political parties, party system change, coalition politics, party finance, and the growth of the middle classes in India; international relations theory and India as an emerging power. He is the Editor-in-Chief of India Review.
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