Award Objective and Requirements:

This award, which comes in the form of a certificate of honor and a monetary grant of $500, recognizes outstanding scholarship in the sociology of religion conducted by a graduate student.  Only one paper may be submitted by each graduate student for each year’s competition.  Authors (and co-authors, in the case of co-authored submissions) must be members of the Association for the Sociology of Religion and currently enrolled graduate students who have not defended their doctoral dissertation at the time their paper is submitted.  All submissions must be in English or translated into English for the committee to review.  Papers may be unpublished, accepted for publication, or already published as an article.

Application Procedure:

Submissions should be in the form of articles with a maximum length of 40 double-spaced, single-sided pages inclusive of all materials:  text, title, notes, tables, figures, and works cited.  The title page should include an abstract of no more than 200 words.  The text should not exceed 12,000 words, i.e., approximately 36 double-spaced pages in 12-point font.

Submission for McNamara consideration is separate from submission for ASR program participation; students who wish their papers considered for the program must submit paper abstracts to the Program Chair following the guidelines presented in the “Call for Papers.”

Award: 

The award will be presented at the opening reception of the 79th Annual Meeting of the Association for the Sociology of Religion (August 12-14, 2017, Montreal, Quebec).  The award includes a certificate of honor and $500.  In the case of multiple authors, the monetary award will be divided among the authors.  The award recipient(s) need not be present at the annual meeting to accept the award, although he/she is highly encouraged to present his/her paper at the annual meeting and to submit the paper to the Association’s journal Sociology of Religion for consideration of publication, if it has not already been published.  The award recipient(s) may also apply for up to $500 travel assistance to present his or her paper at the annual meeting through the Gallagher Travel Grant Competition.

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