Best Article Award in Kurdish Studies

This award, sponsored by Kurdish Political Studies Program at the University of Central Florida, recognizes the best article in Kurdish Studies published in the previous calendar year.

For this award cycle, articles published in 2024 will be considered. All articles published in English-language peer-reviewed journals addressing questions and covering issues related to Kurdish politics, broadly defined, will be considered for the award.

The award is open to all disciplines under social sciences and humanities. The primary author of the article must be an untenured scholar (graduate student, post-doc, independent scholar, assistant professor, or equivalent) at the time of the publication. The winner will be awarded $1000.

Nominations are due by January 15, 2025, and the awardee will be announced by February 15, 2025. Self-nominations are welcome.

Please send an electronic copy of the nominated article to gurses@ucf.edu.

Award Committee:

Previous Awards

2023

First Prize Winner

Suni, Anoush Tamar. 2023. “Palimpsests of Violence: Ruination and the Afterlives of Genocide in Anatolia.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 65(1): 192 – 218. Published online: 10/28/22. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S001041752200041X

Honorable Mention

Mohammed, Sarwar and Tim Gray. 2022. “Political constraints on economic diversification in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq.” Energy Policy 171. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enpol.2022.113274.

2022

Co-Winners

Özgür Sevgi Göral (2021).Waiting for the disappeared: waiting as a form of resilience and the limits of legal space in Turkey. Social Anthropology, 29(3), 800-815.

Nicola Degli Esposti (2021). The 2017 independence referendum and the political economy of Kurdish nationalism in Iraq. Third World Quarterly, 42(10), 2317-2333.

Honorable Mention

Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky (2021). Becoming Armenian: religious conversions in the late imperial South Caucasus. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 63(1), 242-272.

2021

First Prize Winner

Fırat Bozçalı (2020).Probabilistic borderwork: Oil smuggling, nonillegality, and techno‐legal politics in the Kurdish borderlands of Turkey. American Ethnologist, 47(1), 72-85.

Honorable Mention

Zozan Pehlivan. (2020). El Niño and the nomads: Global climate, local environment, and the crisis of pastoralism in late Ottoman Kurdistan.Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 63(3), 316-356.

2020

Co-Winners

Ahmad Mohammadpour  and Kamal Soleimani. “Interrogating the tribal: the aporia of ‘tribalism’ in the sociological study of the Middle East,” British Journal of Sociology 70(5) (2019), 1799-1824.

Marlene Schäfers. “Archived Voices, Acoustic Traces, and the Reverberations of Kurdish History in Modern Turkey,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 61(2) (2019), 447–473.

Honorable Mention

Onur Günay. “In War and Peace: Shifting Narratives of Violence in Kurdish Istanbul,” American Anthropologist 121(3) (2019), 554-567.

2019

First Prize Winner

Dehqan, Mustafa and Vural Genç. “Kurds as Spies: Information-Gathering on the 16th-century Ottoman–Safavid Frontier.” Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 71, no. 2 (2018): 197-230.

Honorable Mention

Gülay Türkmen, “Negotiating Symbolic Boundaries in Conflict Resolution: Religion and Ethnicity in Turkey’s Kurdish Conflict,” Qualitative Sociology 41 (2018): 569–591.

2018

First Prize Winner

Sacha Alsancakli, “Matrimonial Alliances and the Transmission of Dynastic Power in Kurdistan: The Case of the Diyādīnids of Bidlīs in the Fifteenth to Seventeenth Centuries,” Eurasian Studies 15 (2017): 222-49.

Honorable Mention

Serra Hakyemez, “Margins of the Archive: Torture, Heroism, and the Ordinary Prison No. 5 in Turkey,” Anthropological Quarterly 90 (2017): 107-38.

2017

First Prize Winner

Kelda Jamison, “Hefty dictionaries in incomprehensible tongues: commensurating code and language community in Turkey,” Anthropological Quarterly 89 (2016): 31-62.

Honorable Mentions

Erlend Paasche, “The role of corruption in reintegration: experiences of Iraqi Kurds upon return from Europe,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 42 (2016): 1076-93.

Metin Yüksel, “On the borders of the Turkish and Iranian nation-States: The story of Ferzende and Besra,” Middle Eastern Studies 52 (2016): 656-76.

2016 

First Prize Winner
Wendelmoet Hamelink and Hanifi Barış, “Dengbêjs on borderlands: Borders and the state as seen through the eyes of Kurdish singer-poets,” Kurdish Studies 2 (2014): 34-60.

Second Prize Winner

Harun Yilmaz, “The Rise of Red Kurdistan,” Iranian Studies 47 (2014): 799-822

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