Western Society for French History
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Mission Prize

TYLER STOVALL WSFH MISSION PRIZE

Dr. Tyler Stovall hands a graduating student their diploma.

Photo credit: Chris Taggart/Fordham University

The Tyler Stovall WSFH Mission Prize

A crucial part of the WSFH’s mission is to help foster an educational community that is actively committed to achieving equity and inclusion in the production and transmission of knowledge about the francophone world. To that end, the Tyler Stovall Mission Prize recognizes teachers and scholars who are doing outstanding work to combat structural inequalities in the field of French History, the profession, and their home institutions, broadly construed. By celebrating individuals who are developing tools and practices that challenge inequity, oppression, and discrimination, not only through research but also through teaching, mentoring, and professional leadership, the Tyler Stovall WSFH Mission Prize proudly signals the Western’s belief that such work is an essential part of what it means to be an exemplary citizen and educator. The Tyler Stovall WSFH Mission Prize offers a $2000 cash award.

Rationale

The WSFH acknowledges that all forms of professional activity—teaching, mentoring, student advocacy, exhibitions, activism, institutional leadership, and publishing—are vital to the enterprise of higher education and to society at large. The Tyler Stovall WSFH Mission Prize celebrates and rewards high achievement in any combination of the above activities in so far as they demonstrate the ideals of equity, inclusivity, and diversity encapsulated in the WSFH mission statement.

The Mission Prize aims to institutionalize validation for this kind of work in the field of French and Francophone History. The Prize embodies the Western’s commitment to recognize educators and scholars who prioritize equity and inclusion—values that are too often marginalized in traditional academic settings—and the Western’s willingness to invest real resources to give full force to that recognition. The WSFH decided to name the prize after Dr. Tyler Stovall who passed suddenly on December 10, 2021. As a groundbreaking scholar and vital mentor who provided invaluable service to the field, Dr. Stovall exemplifies the ideas and ideals that the Mission Prize was created to recognize.

Donate to the Mission Prize
 

Current and Past Winners

 

2024 winner

2024’s winner is Dr. Laura Talamante, a Professor of History at California State University, Dominguez Hills, who guides students in research on issues of human rights and social justice, and whose research focuses on women, politics and culture, proto-feminism, and citizenship development in Enlightenment and revolutionary France. Dr. Talamante builds connections across a broad range of groups, involving her students, colleagues, and the wider community in scholarly discussions about historical discrimination and oppression through film festivals, student-led research and authorship, community-service learning, workshops, and more. In addition to being an accomplished researcher and author, Dr. Talamante is an engaged member of her community and a dedicated mentor of undergraduate and graduate students alike. She is also a leader on her campus and in her university system, and she is an outspoken advocate for gender equity, racial justice, and mutual cultural understanding.

Laura Talamante is Professor and Chair of History at California State University, Dominguez Hills. As a Latina and first-generation college student and scholar, she divides her interests between teaching, research, scholarship, and academic service. She earned her Ph.D. in History at UCLA, where her, “Les Citoyennes Marseillaises: Women and Political Change during the French Revolution,” won the Mary Wollstonecraft Dissertation Award. She publishes primarily on women, politics and culture, citizenship development, revolutionary geopolitical and geosocial mapping, and proto-feminism in Enlightenment and revolutionary Marseille. Prior to the Tyler Stovall Western Society for French History Mission Prize, she has received numerous honors and awards, including residency fellowships at the Brown Foundation Maison Dora Maar in Ménerbes, France and the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France, a National Endowment for the Humanities Landmarks of American History and Culture grant, and two French American Cultural Exchange Tournée Festival of French Films grants. Most recently, she won the Presidential Outstanding Professor of the Year award, and she was selected as the EHESS/Iméra Chair of Transregional Studies as part of her Iméra Institute of Advanced Studies fellowship.

 

The Inaugural Winners: 2022

  • Dr. Nimisha Barton is a Lecturer at Cal State Long Beach and a Consultant in higher education. Drawing on a decade of experience as a college educator, a university administrator, and a DEI practitioner, she works closely with organizational leaders to develop anti-bias programs, trainings, and curricula for adult audiences. She is the author of several award-winning books, edited volumes, and articles.  Her most recent book, entitled A Just Future: Getting From Diversity and Inclusion to Equity and Justice in Higher Education explores the early radical potential of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in educational institutions and encourages educators to once again pursue educational freedom through anti-oppressive praxis. Her first book, Reproductive Citizens: Gender, the State, and Immigration in France, 1880-1945, published by Cornell University Press in 2020, won the J. Russell Major Prize for Best Book in French History from the American Historical Association. Dr. Barton completed her PhD in history at Princeton and a dual BA at UC Berkeley.

  • Dr. Abdellali Hajjat is Associate Professor in Sociology at the Université libre de Bruxelles (Belgium). He is the co-founder of Marronnages: Race & Social Sciences. His research interests focus on various issues: citizenship and race in French law; urban uprisings and political mobilizations by postcolonial immigrants; Islamophobia; hate crime and criminal justice system; postcolonial controversies in Belgium. He recently published The Wretched of France: The 1983 March for Equality and Against Racism (Indiana University Press, 2022) and co-authored Islamophobia in France. The Construction of the “Muslim problem” (University of Georgia Press, 2023). Website: https://hajjat.ulb.be. 

  • Trained as an historian at the Sorbonne-Paris VII University, Dr. Sylvie Kandé is the author of Terres, urbanisme et architecture 'créoles' en Sierra Leone, 18ème-19ème siècles (L'Harmattan, 1998) and the editor of  Discours sur le métissage, identités métisses. En quête d'Ariel (L'Harmattan, 1999). She contributed an essay on the Krio/Creoles of Sierra Leone to volume X of the UNESCO General History of Africa and an analysis of the French dimension of the Atlantic slave trade in the Routledge Handbook of French History (2024).

    Dr. Kandé is also the author of three collections of poetry published by Gallimard.  Lagon, lagunes. Tableau de Mémoire (2000) was postfaced by Edouard Glissant. La quête infinie de l’autre rive : épopée en trois chants (2011), short-listed for the Prix Mahogany and the Prix des Découvreurs, received the 2017 Prix Lucienne Gracia-Vincent under the auspices of Fondation Saint John Perse and is now published in German by Matthes & Seitz., and in English by Wesleyan U. Press as The Neverending Quest for the Other Shore. An Epic in Three Cantos (2022). Gestuaire (2016), short-listed for the Prix Ethiophile and the Prix Kowalski des lycéens, received the 2017 Prix Louise Labé,  and is anthologized in German as Stiller Tausch (Lyrik Kabinett by Hanser 2024). An English version of this collection is fortcoming (Seagull, 2025).

 

Nominations

Eligibility Requirements

Nominees must have been employed in the past twelve months at an educational institution that engages with French and Francophone History such as a museum, archive, library, or institution of higher education (research university, liberal arts college, community college, etc.). Research/ instructional or administrative/professional faculty, adjuncts, lecturers, clinical professors, professors of practice, and tenure-line professors (assistant, associate, full) will all be considered. Nominees must have earned a Master’s degree or above

Nomination and Submission Process

Candidates for the Prize can self-nominate or be nominated by someone else. Nominations are due 15 December each year. This year, the deadline has been extended to 31 March 2024. All nominees will be invited to submit a cover letter and a CV for review. Shortlisted nominees will be asked for more materials.

Nominations (to be submitted by 31 March, 2024):

  1. Nominations (name, institutional affiliation and position, contact information, and a brief 150-word rationale) should be sent to wsfhmissionprize@wsfh.org.

  2. Committee members will email nominees alerting them that they have been nominated and sending list of materials to submit a cover letter and a CV if they wish to move forward as candidates for the prize.

  3. Only nominees who send in materials will be considered further, allowing those who were nominated but did not want to be considered to opt out.

First tier:

  1. Candidates send CV and a 2-page cover letter with a description of how their work embodies the WSFH’s Mission Statement.

  2. Committee decides on who continues to second tier (around 10 nominees).

Second tier (to be submitted by June 15, 2024):

  1. Candidates submit a portfolio documenting work to foster equity and inclusion in the production and transmission of knowledge about the francophone world. Portfolios will vary for each candidate but may include any of the following:

    1. Descriptions and materials for events, excursions, trainings, workshops, exhibitions, service or leadership engagements

    2. Syllabi for courses taught

    3. Publications (books, articles [journal, newspaper, newsletter, etc.], blogs/vlogs, interviews)

    4. Artistic productions

Questions may be directed to wsfhmissionprize@wsfh.org.

Evaluation

Submissions will be evaluated by a standing committee of 3-5 people selected from the Governing Council, membership, and outside of the WSFH to serve a fixed term of two years.

The first guiding principle for the evaluating committee is to judge submissions on the professional and societal impact, which may mean looking beyond traditional publication venues and forms. The committee will not evaluate nominees according to the professional division between research, teaching, and service, but will instead take a holistic approach to the nominees’ contributions to the profession. This approach means evaluating leadership, mentorship, non-traditional publications, and traditionally recognized research as constituent parts of what makes French and Francophone history accessible, relevant, and important to today’s society. In the spirit of the Mission Prize, the committee welcomes nominations from a range of historically related fields aside from traditional French history. These include, but are not limited to, African, Caribbean, Disability, Ethnic, Gender, Global, LGBTQ, and Postcolonial Studies.

The second guiding principle for the committee is self-reflection. At all stages of the evaluation process, the committee will examine its own implicit and explicit biases and assumptions about the academic profession and the study of the francophone world. 

Announcement of winner/s

The winners of the Tyler Stovall WSFH Mission Prize will be announced at the annual meeting of the WSFH.