UFS/AS Young African Scholar Award 2018-2019 (5,000 ZAR prize)

Deadline: September 30, 2018

Applications are open for the UFS/AS Young African Scholar Award 2018-2019. This award seeks to strengthen efforts to further promote internationally recognised African scholarship in African Studies.

Scholarship in African Studies still faces the challenge of capacity building to enhance ownership by authors and institutions from and on the African continent. It also requires more coordinated efforts to provide the deserved space by African authors in the international domain.

In 2014 the Centre for Africa Studies (CAS) – as of 2018 the Centre for Gender and Africa Studies (CGAS) – at the University of the Free State (UFS) in Bloemfontein became affiliated with the Africa Europe Group for Interdisciplinary Studies (AEGIS), of which the Institute of African Affairs at the GIGA German Institute of Global and Area Studies in Hamburg is a core member.

The GIGA publishes Africa Spectrum, putting out three issues annually. It is listed in the Journal Citation Reports by Thomson Reuters, among other indexes. The journal is also linked to the German African Studies Association (Vereinigung für Afrikawissenschaften in Deutschland, VAD). Sharing a commitment to African capacity building in African Studies, in 2015 the partner institutions established the first annual Young African Scholar Award.

Award

• Scholars who have been published under the auspices of the Young African Scholar Award will be granted a three-year affiliation with the Centre for Gender and Africa Studies (CGAS) as a Research Fellow (without remuneration) in recognition of the achievement, along with prize money of ZAR 5,000, sponsored by the UFS.

Eligibility

• Open to postgraduate students nearing completion of their PhD theses and postdoctoral scholars within five years of having been awarded their PhD at the time of the submission deadline;
• Authors should be from Africa or affiliated with African institutions;
• Scholars affiliated with the CGAS are ineligible.

Selection Criteria

Papers should follow the formal guidelines for research articles as specified and be submitted under the section UFS/AS. By October, a review committee comprised of one representative from each partner institution will select the submissions for publication.

The selected papers will then go through the journal’s standard double-blind peer-review process and finally also be screened by at least one more member of the journal’s editorial group who is not part of the review committee. If accepted, the paper will be published in the journal’s first issue of the following year, jointly with a call for papers pertinent to the next award.

Application

Click here to apply

For more information, visit UFS/AS Young African Scholar Award.