Rivers Paper Prize Competitions

Deadline July 1, 2023

Awarded in odd numbered years

The SMA announces the competition for the W.H.R. Rivers Undergraduate Student Paper Prize.

The W.H.R. Rivers competitions focus on student achievements. The Rivers Prize will be given for an outstanding paper in medical anthropology written by an undergraduate student. The names of the winners (and of their mentoring professors, if appropriate) will be announced at the SMA Awards Ceremony during the AAA Annual Meetings.

Please encourage your students to apply.

Papers must have been written while the applicant was a student, in this or the preceding academic year only. The prize carries a $250 cash award. The journal Medical Anthropology Quarterly (MAQ) will have the right of first refusal (i.e., priority over any other publications to review the winning manuscript, should the award winner be interested in publishing the winning essay).

For the next Rivers Undergraduate Student Paper Prize, send materials to the chair, Erin Koch (erin.koch@uky.edu) by July 1, 2023.

All submissions must be electronic. Papers should not exceed 20 double- spaced pages, not including bibliography. To support blind review, no identifying information or acknowledgments should be contained in the manuscript. Only the paper’s title should appear prior to the text on page 1.

Submitted papers should be accompanied by a cover letter containing (1) the paper title; (2) the competition into which it is being entered (Rivers); (3) author details (including information on student status and relevant advisor’s name, if any); and (4) contact information, including postal mailing address, phone number, and email address. The committee chair will send the submitted paper and the cover letter to the relevant subcommittee members.

Notification of competition results will be made in October. It is the entrant’s responsibility to keep the prize coordinator, Salih Can Aciksoz (aciksoz@ucla.edu) updated as to any change in his or her email contact information. If you are the winner and cannot be contacted, you will forfeit the prize.

Click here to see past recipients