ISCH Prize Competition 2024 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early career, the International Society for Cultural History (ISCH) has offered over the years a prize for the best unpublished article on cultural history. In 2023, the ISCH decided to turn the competition into a prize for the best ISCH conference presentation by an early career scholar in the annual ISCH conferences, which in 2024 was held in Potsdam, Germany.

The number of submissions this year, 18, was unprecedented and their average quality also remarkable. The variety of different topics and approaches counted into cultural history is always impressive: we were pleased as always to see presentations coming from various countries and ranging widely in their methodology, geography, source material and subject matter, which, in a year when the conference was devoted to the history of the body, included – to sample just a few – female choruses in Ancient Greece, the embodied subject in the female monastic world, the diagnosis of frenzy and the preternatural body in early modern England, body parts used as ingredients in Denmark, the body of Italian ballerinas in nineteenth-century Paris, the embodied experiences of Indigenous women in South Africa, as well as black natural hair in Nigeria.

The ISCH prize committee – which last year 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.

In the words of its author, the winning presentation pursues “a form of transdisciplinary historical movement research that sees the body as a multi-sensory gateway to, and object of, historical knowledge acquisition through a performative examination of (raw) source material. It is grounded in phenomenology and primarily relies on experiential methods”. We found it unique for its exceptional interdisciplinarity and strong focus on methodology. The author explained the theoretical framework of sensory/performative turn in Classical Studies very well and placed his subject clearly in relation to other scholarly studies, displaying a large number of images, some videos, as well as bringing some objects mentioned in the presentation to show them to the audience.

It gives us great pleasure to award the 2024 ISCH prize to the author of the paper

Archaeokinetics: Research-Historical, Theoretical, and Methodological Considerations onReconstructing Ancient Athletics,

Maximilian Tarik Orliczek, from the University of Graz, Austria.