Call for Nominations: Kathleen Kirk Gilmore Dissertation Award

Monday, August 12, 2024, Deadline for Submitting Dissertations for Consideration for the
Society for Historical Archaeology’s 2025 Kathleen Kirk Gilmore Dissertation Award

The 2025 Kathleen Kirk Gilmore Dissertation Award will be presented to a recent graduate whose dissertation is considered by the Kathleen Kirk Gilmore Dissertation Award Panel to be an outstanding contribution to historical archaeology. In January 2011, the SHA Board of Directors voted to change the name of the SHA Dissertation Prize to the Kathleen Kirk Gilmore Dissertation Award to honor Kathleen Kirk Gilmore, who passed away in 2010. She was a pioneer in the field of historical archaeology and a past president of the SHA.

The awardee will receive $1,000 at the time the award is presented during the January 2025 annual meeting. Receipt of the award and the monetary prize are no longer dependent upon publication of the dissertation with the University Press of Florida. Awardees may take their dissertation to any press, including SHA.

If the winner chooses to work with SHA on publication of their dissertation, he or she will

  • receive the endorsement of the society and an associate editor to guide them through the publication process
  • receive assistance from SHA in finding the appropriate press and contract arrangements
  • be required to assign copyright of the manuscript and donate any royalties for their book to SHA
  • agree not to submit their dissertation for consideration elsewhere

If the choice is made not to publish through SHA, the winner is responsible for arranging publication on his or her own.

To be considered for the 2025 award, nominees must have officially received their Ph.D. degrees within three years prior to May 31, 2024 (between June 1, 2021, and May 31, 2024). In the nomination letter, the nominator must provide the date the nominee officially received their Ph.D. (verification preferred, which could be a transcript or some other form of proof of date of receipt of Ph.D. degree). A digital version of the dissertation must be provided to Teresita Majewski, Gilmore Dissertation Award Coordinator, by August 12, 2024 (e-mail is preferred, but contact the coordinator for alternate methods to submit the digital version of the dissertation if necessary, particularly if the file size of the dissertation is over 10‒15 MB). Hard copies of the dissertation or copies on CD-ROM or DVD are no longer required. Very Important: The nominator or nominee must also provide the nominee’s contact information, including current mailing address, e-mail address, and telephone number(s).

Nominations must be made by nonstudent SHA members and must consist of one nomination letter that makes a case for the dissertation. Self-nominations will not be accepted. NOMINEES AND NOMINATORS MUST BE MEMBERS OF THE SOCIETY FOR HISTORICAL ARCHAEOLOGY AT THE TIME THE NOMINATION IS SUBMITTED. The nominator must provide verification of both his/her SHA membership status as well as that of the nominee.

Deadline for receipt of all nomination materials for the 2025 award is Monday, August 12, 2024. The panel will begin their deliberations shortly thereafter.

The winner will be notified of the selection panel’s decision by October/November 2024.

For more information or to submit nomination materials:
Kathleen Kirk Gilmore Dissertation Award
c/o Teresita Majewski, Coordinator, Gilmore Dissertation Award
PHONE: (520) 907-9677 (cell)
E-mail: tmajewski@sricrm.com

Previous Dissertation Prize Winners:

  • 2001 – Michelle M. Terrell (Boston University, 2000), An Historical Archaeology of the 17th- and 18th- Century Jewish Community of Nevis, British West Indies, published by SHA-UPF in 2005 as The Jewish Community of Early Colonial Nevis: A Historical Archaeological Study
  • 2002 – No prize was awarded
  • 2003 – Kurt Jordan (Columbia University, 2002), The Archaeology of the Iroquois Restoration: Settlement, Housing, and Economy at a Dispersed Seneca Community, ca. A.D. 1715–1754, published by SHA-UPF in 2008 as The Seneca Restoration, 1715–1754: An Iroquois Local Political Economy
  • 2004 – Nathan Richards (Flinders University [Australia], 2002), Deep Structures: An Examination of Deliberate Watercraft Abandonment in Australia, published by SHA-UPF in 2008 as Ships’ Graveyards: Abandoned Watercraft and the Archaeological Formation Process
  • 2005 – J. Cameron Monroe (University of California, Los Angeles, 2003), Building Dahomey: Landscape, Architecture and Political Order in Atlantic West Africa, published in 2014 by Cambridge University Press as The Precolonial State in West Africa: Building Power in Dahomey
  • 2006 – Elizabeth Kellar (Syracuse University, 2004), Construction and Expression of Identity: An Archaeological Investigation of the Laborer Villages at Adrian Estate, St. John, USVI
  • 2007 – Elizabeth Jordan (Rutgers University, 2006), “From Time Immemorial”: Washerwomen, Culture, and Community in Capetown, South Africa
  • 2008 – Sarah Croucher (University of Manchester [UK], 2006), Plantations on Zanzibar: An Archaeological Approach to Complex Identities, published by Springer in 2015 as Capitalism and Cloves: An Archaeology of Plantation Life on Nineteenth Century Zanzibar
  • 2009 – Neil L. Norman (University of Virginia, 2008), An Archaeology of West African Atlanticization: Regional Analysis of the Huedan Palace Districts and Countryside, Benin, 1650–1727
  • 2010 – Meredith Linn (Columbia University, 2008), From Typhus to Tuberculosis and Fractures in Between: A Visceral Historical Archaeology of Irish Immigrant Life in New York City 1845–1870, published by University of Tennessee Press and SHA in 2024 as Irish Fever: An Archaeology of Illness, Injury, and Healing in New York City, 1845–1875
  • 2011 – Gérard Chouin (Syracuse University, 2009), Forests of Power and Memory: An Archaeology of Sacred Groves in the Eguafo Polity, Southern Ghana (c. 500–1900 A.D.)
  • 2012 – Liza Gijanto (Syracuse University, 2010), Change and the Era of the Atlantic Trade: Commerce and Interaction in the Niumi Commercial Center (The Gambia), published by Routledge in 2017 as The Life of Trade: Events and Happenings in Niumi’s Atlantic Center
  • 2013 – Rebecca Sara Graff (University of Chicago, 2011), The Vanishing City: Time, Tourism, and the Archaeology of Event at Chicago’s 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition
  • 2014 – Felipe Gaitán Ammann (Columbia, University 2012), An Archaeology of the Slave Trade in Late-Seventeenth Century Panama (1663–1674)
  • 2015 – Risto Nurmi (University of Oulu [Finland], 2011), Development of the Urban Mind – An Object Biographical Approach, The Case Study of the Town of Tornio, Northern Finland
  • 2016 – C. Riley Augé (University of Montana, 2013), Silent Sentinels: Archaeology, Magic, and the Gendered Control of Domestic Boundaries in New England, 1620–1725, published by SHA-UPF in 2020 as The Archaeology of Magic: Gender and Domestic Protection in Seventeenth-Century New England
  • 2017 ‒ Jason Thomas Raupp (Flinders University, 2015), “And So Ends this Day’s Work”: Industrial Perspectives on Early Nineteenth-century American Whaleships Wrecked in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands
  • 2018 ‒ Heather Walder (University of Wisconsin‒Madison, 2015), “…A Thousand Beads for Each Nation:” Exchange, Interactions, and Technological Practices in the Upper Great Lakes c.  1630‒1730
  • 2019 ‒ Paul Logue (Queen’s University Belfast, 2016), A Reinterpretation of the Archaeology of the Nine Year’s War in Ulster from a Cultural Perspective
  • 2020 – Ashley Atkins Spivey (College of William & Mary, 2017), Knowing the River, Working the Land, and Digging for Clay: Pamunkey Indian Subsistence Practices and the Market Economy 1800‒1900
  • 2021 – Brooke L. Drew (University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, 2018), Death in Anonymity: Population Dynamics and the Individual within the Milwaukee County Poor Farm Cemetery, 1882–1925
  • 2022 – Miriam A. W. Rothenberg (Joukowsky Institute of Archaeology and the Ancient World, Brown University, 2021), Community and Corrosion: A Contemporary Archaeology of Montserrat‘s Volcanic Crisis in Long-Term Comparative Perspective
  • 2023 – Haeden E. Stewart (University of Chicago, 2019), In the Shadow of Industry: The Lively Decay of Mill Creek Ravine
  • 2024 – Elizabeth Catherine Clay (University of Pennsylvania, 2021), Slavery and Freedom on the Fringes of France: Historical Archaeology at Habitation La Caroline, French Guiana