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 published research which showcases the unique strengths of Area Studies, its special applicability in real-world contexts, and position at the interface of multiple disciplines.  We aim to celebrate research that 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.

>The research should be original.

> The 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 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.

> Routledge and the judging panel acknowledge that impact can be defined in different ways by different communities and individuals. Applicants for the Impact Award should make clear how they personally are defining impact in relation to their research. Aspects to be considered could include, but are not limited to, academic, cultural, economic, environmental, policy, social, training, and health/wellbeing.

• 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.

• 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.

• Previous winners are not eligible for entry in successive years.

• Applications will not be considered if the nomination form submitted is incomplete, the copy of the peer-reviewed 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.

• The judges’ decision will be final, and no correspondence will be entered into.

• 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 winning article(s).

Information about the 2022 winners and shortlisted projects can be found here. Nominations for the 2023 Routledge Area Studies awards will open in spring 2023.

Please note, the following must be submitted to be considered for either Area Studies award:

  • Completed application form

  • CV of the corresponding applicant

  • A copy of the peer-reviewed article(s) presenting the research

  • A translation of the peer-reviewed article if the original article is not in English

  • A maximum of ten pieces of written, visual or statistical evidence to support your submission. Where possible, a Word document containing links to evidence should be provided instead of attachments. Evidence may include, but is not limited to: posters, 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, photos, policy briefs, performance reviews, 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]. 

Eswaran Sridharan headshot

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.

Professional photo of David Lees

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.

Suisheng Zhao headshot

Suisheng Zhao

Suisheng Zhao is Professor and Director of the Center for China-US Cooperation at Josef Korbel School of International Studies, University of Denver. He is the Editor of Journal of Contemporary China and has published dozens of articles and more than ten books on the politics and international relations of China.

Divine Fuh headshot

Divine Fuh

Divine Fuh is an anthropologist based at the University of Cape Town, where he is the Director of the Institute for Humanities in Africa (HUMA). He was the Head of Publications and Dissemination Programme at the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA) from 2017-2020.

Susan Hodgett headshot

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).

Matthias Neumann headshot

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).

Nicola Pratt

Nicola Pratt is a professor in the Politics and International Studies Department at the University of Warwick. She teaches and researches on the international politics of the Middle East, with a particular interest in feminist and decolonial approaches and a focus on ‘politics from below.’ Her most recent monograph Embodying Geopolitics: Generations of Women’s Activism in Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon (2020, University of California Press) was awarded the Susan Strange Prize for the best book by the British International Studies Association, with a forthcoming co-authored book focusing on popular culture and the contested meanings of the 2011 Egyptian revolution (also the subject of a multimedia, digital archive that she co-curated).

Gregorio Alonso headshot

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.

Rumi Aoyama headshot

Rumi Aoyama

Rumi Aoyama is the director of Waseda Institute of Contemporary Chinese Studies, a Professor at the Graduate School of Asia-Pacific Studies at Waseda University, and the Managing Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Contemporary East Asia Studies. She specializes in China’s contemporary foreign policy and politics.

JH Initials

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.

Nalini Mohabir headshot

Nalini Mohabir

Nalini Mohabir is an assistant professor in the department of Geography, Planning, and Environment at Concordia University. She writes, researches, and teaches in the fields of feminist and postcolonial migration geographies, and is interested in gender and racial justice, as well as flows of power and social change. 

Godwin Siundu headshot

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.

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