From: Paul Tritton, Hon. Press Officer Email: [email protected] Telephone 01622 741198 ISSUED 12 NOVEMBER 2015
New £250 prize for history students
The Kent Archaeological Society (KAS) announces a new biennial prize named in honour of the late Dr Joan Thirsk, who was a distinguished historian and a long‐standing member of the Society.
The £250 Thirsk Prize will be awarded for a dissertation or a long essay, submitted as part of a successful Master’s degree, which is judged to be a major contribution to the history of Kent (including districts which were originally part of the county and are now within the Medway unitary authority and the London boroughs of Bexley, Bromley, Greenwich and Lewisham).
Dissertations and essays can be submitted from any academic institution.
The prize aims to reward students working on the history and archaeology of Kent and to help promote publication of articles and chapters that advance scholarly knowledge of the county’s past.
The KAS be willing to give advice on publication. The editor of the society’s annual journal, Archaeologia Cantiana, will also consider publishing articles based on the various submissions.
SUBMISSION GUIDELINES
The KAS will consider, for the first Thirsk Prize, dissertations and long essays completed for a Master’s degree within the calendar years 2015 and 2016.The final date for submissions is 31 December 2016.
Dissertations and long essays must be submitted as a printed hard copy and also in electronic form on a disk.
The hard copy must be suitably bound or within rigid covers and the disk must be in Word format. The submission must include an abstract and be accompanied by a letter of recommendation from the thesis supervisor together, where appropriate, with the names and the institutions of the examiners of the thesis.
Copies of dissertations and long essays will not be returned but will be placed in the KAS library. All candidates for the prize will be notified of the judges’ decision within three calendar months, or such time as is agreed.
Submissions should be addressed to Dr Elizabeth Edwards, School of History, Rutherford College, The University, Canterbury, Kent CT2 7NX, tel: 01227 700207, email: [email protected]
Founded 1857 Registered Charity No: 223382 www.kentarchaeology.org.uk www.kentarchaeology.ac
Joan Thirsk CBE (pictured above), lived at Hadlow Castle, Tonbridge and turned to history after working in the wartime Intelligence Service at Bletchley Park. She taught at the universities of Leicester and Oxford and became a leading authority on agrarian history on which she wrote and published extensively. Joan was a past president of both the Tonbridge Historical Society and the Kent History Federation. One of her last books, published a few years before she died in 2013, aged 91, was a history of the Kent village of Hadlow 1450‐1600.
Founded 1857 Registered Charity No: 223382 www.kentarchaeology.org.uk www.kentarchaeology.ac 2