ISCH Prize Competition 2025 for Cultural Historians

Message from the Prize Committee

In order to support cultural historical research and encourage scholars in their early career, the International Society for Cultural History (ISCH) offers the yearly ISCH Prize for the best conference presentation by an early career scholar in the annual ISCH conferences, which in 2025 was held in Rovaniemi, Finland.

The diversity and quality of submissions, this year as in previous editions, was significant. The variety of different topics and approaches counted into cultural history saw presentations coming from various countries and ranging widely in their methodology, geography, source material and subject matter; in a year when the conference was devoted to Human/Nature—Entanglements in Cultural History, included – among others – museums revisited from a rhizomatic perspective, the body of the ascetic as a space in late medieval Siena, as well as emotional responses to animal exploitation in Early Modern Italy.

The ISCH prize committee – which as in the past few years was composed by Alessandro Arcangeli, Josephine Hoegaerts and Jasmin Lukkari – assessed all the presentations by evaluating them according to their methodological innovation, theoretical originality, historiographical significance as well as style, coherence, and visual aid. Ultimately, the panel of judges was unanimous in its decision.

The winning presentation is based on an examination of 11 learned treatises exploring the nature and reality of witches and demons produced in 17th-century England, and on a close reading of two of their authors. In the words of its author, the sources “demonstrate a mode of thinking about nature as not only a morally charged force but also […] as porous and agentive in ways that suggest how ‘witchcraft literature’ can be a rich source for studying historical understandings of nature beyond its mere symbolic meaning – therefore contributing originally to the current scholarly debate about non- (or post-)human agencies. It presents a very clearly articulated argument, which is embedded in existing literature and argues both with some of its precepts, and against some received knowledge.

It gives us great pleasure to award the 2025 ISCH prize to the author of the paper

Rulers of the Air: Understanding Weather in English Demonological Writings,

by Johanna Johannsdottir Damaris, from the University of Gothenburg, Sweden (link).