U.S. Intellectual History Blog

MIH/S-USIH Graduate Student Conference Paper Prize

The Society for U. S. Intellectual History (S-USIH) is pleased to announce its inaugural recipient of the first annual MIH/S-USIH Graduate Student Conference Paper Prize.

Modern Intellectual History (MIH) is sponsoring this prize for the best paper delivered at a S-USIH conference by a graduate student. All graduate students who present at the conference are eligible. The recipient receives a prize designation along with a modest honorarium, and will be shepherded through the publication process at MIH. [Note: On the latter, prize-winning submissions to MIH must still meet formatting requirements and pass through an external review process.]

This first prize, for our 2019 conference, goes to Danielle Stubbe, a doctoral candidate at Vanderbilt University, for her submission, “Patrons and Politics of the Culture Concept: Postwar Disciplinary Myth-Making in the History of Anthropology.”

Stubbe’s essay explores how the culture concept played into a perceived “crisis in anthropology” in the 1960s and 1970s. During the preceding decades anthropologists had found themselves struggling on a number of fronts: complicity in militarized statecraft projects that often served to essentialize cultural phenomena, ongoing “whispers about colonialism in the anthropological legacy,” and a diminishing “prominence within the postwar liberal world.” In this context, Stubbe argues, George Stocking sought to rehabilitate the discipline of anthropology by affirming the centrality of both Franz Boas and an anti-racist culture concept to its history and trajectory. The committee admired Stubbe’s essay for its wide-ranging engagement with the defining tensions of postwar anthropology, and its sensitive depiction of how narratives about the history of the discipline influenced its ongoing practices.

The Selection Committee:

Angus Burgin, Johns Hopkins University (Chair)
Sarah Gardner, Mercer University
Sara Georgini, Massachusetts Historical Society
Dan Wickberg, University of Texas at Dallas