Nancy Abelmann Prize for Outstanding Graduate Student Paper

GRADUATE STUDENT PAPER – PRIZE ANNOUNCEMENT

The Society for East Asian Anthropology now invites submissions for the 2025 SEAA Nancy Abelmann Prize for Outstanding Graduate Student Paper.
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This prize of $300 is awarded annually for the best graduate student paper on any aspect of East Asian anthropology and/or East Asian anthropology’s contribution to the broader field. The prize is named in honor of Nancy Abelmann (1959–2016), a renowned scholar who was legendary for her mentorship of advisees and other students in the overlapping fields of Korean Studies, Women’s and Gender Studies, Asian American Studies, and the anthropology of transnationalism and diaspora. The winning paper will be given the option of expedited review in the journal Asian Anthropology.

The Prize Committee welcomes all papers dealing with the anthropological study of East Asian societies and cultures, or other societies/cultures and diasporic and transnational communities with historical or contemporary ties to East Asia, including papers that focus on digital media or online ethnography. Papers will be read by a committee of the Society for East Asian Anthropology and judged on original empirical research and contribution to the field; organization, quality, clarity of writing, and cogency of argument. The author of the paper judged to be of the highest quality will receive the prize.

The manuscript should be submitted as an email attachment to SEAA Webmaster at
seaa.americananthro+abelmann [at]gmail.com. Please anonymize your document as you
would when submitting it for peer review (no name, email, or affiliation inside the document). The Webmaster will ensure the submission is anonymized before distributing it to this year’s committee (Xinyu Guan, Satsuki Kawano, Ellen Oxfeld, Heangjin Park, and Lihong Shi).

General eligibility criteria:

1. At the time of their submission, students must either be in a degree-granting program (including MA or PhD) or be a recent MA graduate (within one year).
2. Paper must be the original work of the student, not accepted for publication or published at the time of submission.
3. Limit one submission per student.

Manuscript format criteria:

1. All manuscripts must be typed, double-spaced, with one-inch margins.
2. Maximum length for the body of the text is up to 7,000 words; the abstract, tables, notes, and references may constitute additional pages.
3. All submissions must follow the standard anthropological format for citations, endnotes, and “References” as outlined in the Asian Anthropology style guide.
4. Dissertation or thesis chapters should be reorganized as articles that can stand alone.
5. Authors must include a title and also an abstract of 200 words or less on the first page of the paper.
6. One email attachment of the manuscript is to be submitted to the SEAA Webmaster at
   seaa.americananthro+abelmann[at]gmail. com. Please anonymize your document as
   you would when submitting it for peer review (no name, email, or affiliation inside
   the document).
7. The deadline is August 1, 2025. No late entries will be accepted. The winning paper will receive a $300 prize and the option of expedited review in Asian Anthropology.
8. The prize winner will be announced in early October and the prize will be awarded at the SEAA Annual Business Meeting held during the American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting in November 2025 (in New Orleans).
9. Entries that do not conform to the above requirements will not be considered.