for Excellence in Comics Studies
The Society for Comics Studies (ComFor) and the Committee for Comics Studies at the German Society for Media Studies (GfM) present an annual award for the best article by an early-career scholar.
In 2021, the Society for Comics Studies (ComFor) and the Committee for Comics Studies at the German Society for Media Studies (GfM), will award the Martin Schüwer Publication Prize for Excellence in Comics Studies for the third time. Since 2019, the prize has been awarded annually. It promotes the work of emerging scholars, i.e. researchers who, regardless of their actual age, do not yet hold a permanent academic position as tenured faculty. Honoring outstanding publications in the interdisciplinary field of comics studies, the Martin Schüwer Publication Prize aims to create more visibility for comics-related research, promoting and communicating its importance to a wider public.
The prize is named after the late Martin Schüwer, a scholar of English Literature and Culture who specialized in comics studies and who, very unfortunately, died at a far too early age in 2013. His dissertation Wie Comics erzählen (2006) has opened up new ground for narratological comics research and has become a standard work in German-language comics studies. With this and his other works on comics as well as on the didactics of English literature, Martin Schüwer has set valuable standards regarding the excellence, accessibility and range that publications in our fields can achieve. Both as a comics researcher and as a person, Schüwer had a distinct way of talking to people, characterized by his open-mindedness and a genuine interest in others. Talking to and with others, he aimed to advance comics studies. We dedicate the award to him and this very goal.
Submission and nominations:
Eligible for submission are published texts that do not exceed the length of an article or book chapter. They may have appeared as articles in collective volumes or journals, as chapters in longer monographs, or as essays and other text types of similar length. The submitted/nominated texts may have been written by one or more authors. Authors are only eligible for the award if, at the time of nomination, they did not yet hold a permanent job position within academia.
Papers nominated for the Martin Schüwer Prize 2021 must have been published between January 1, 2019 and December 31, 2020, in either German or English. Texts that are still forthcoming or only accepted for publication cannot be considered. Papers can only be submitted once. Entire monographs as well as unpublished work from dissertational research are also excluded from submission. Editors of collective volumes or journal issues cannot be nominated; however, nomination of individual contributions to these collections/issues are very welcome.
To nominate yourself or others, please submit the nominated text and a short explanatory statement (300-500 words). Self-nominations are possible and welcome. The deadline for all submissions is March 31, 2021. Please send your nomination as a single pdf to schuewer-preis@comicgesellschaft.de.
Prize and award ceremony:
The award ceremony will take place during the annual conference of the Society for Comics Studies (autumn 2021). The awardee will be asked to give a lecture and introduce their research during the conference. They will also be invited to serve as a member of the jury in the following year and will receive a prize money of 500.00 €. In addition, the German Society for Media Studies (GfM) will free them from any membership fee for one year.
Previous Laureates:
2020:
Gesine Wegner: “Reflections on the Boom of Graphic Pathography: The Effects and Affects of Narrating Disability and Illness in Comics.”
Honourable Mention for
Joanna Nowotny: “Repetition oder Revolution? Posthumane Identitätsentwürfe im Superheldencomic der Gegenwart.”
2019:
Dorothee Marx (née Schneider): “The ‘Affected Scholar’. Reading Raina Telgemeier’s Ghosts as a Disability Scholar and Cystic Fibrosis-Patient.”
Honourable Mention for
Nina Eckhoff-Heindl : “Opazität und Transparenz: Überlegungen zum poietischen Potenzial in Chris Wares Comics und Animationen”
and
Lukas Etter: “Visible Hand? Subjectivity and Its Stylstic Markers in Graphic Narratives.”