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Best Student Paper Award (Formerly Shils-Coleman)

The Best Student Paper recognizes distinguished work in theory by a graduate student. Work may take the form of (a) a paper published or accepted for publication; (b) a paper presented at a professional meeting; of (c) a paper suitable for publication or presentation at a professional meeting.
​How to submit 
to current prize competition

Current winner

​2020 Shils-Coleman Award Winner: Aaron Horvath
This year's winner for the Edward Shils - James Coleman Memorial Award for Best Student Paper is Aaron Horvath, "From Accounting to Accountability: Organizational Supererogation and the Transformation of Nonprofit Disclosure."

Committee: Josh Pacewicz (Chair), Alex Barnard, Marco Garrido, Barbara Kiviat, Mikell Hyman

Past Winners


2019 Shils-Coleman Award Co-Winners: Amanda Cheong & Neil Gong
Amanda Cheong, Princeton University, “Legal Omission as Political Strategy: Motivations for and Consequences of Deliberate Contractions of the State's Administrative Power” 
Neil Gong, University of California, Los Angeles, “That Proves You Mad, Because You Know it Not: Impaired Insight and the Dilemma of Governing Psychiatry Patients as Legal Subjects,” Theory and Society 46(3):201-228. 2017. 
Honorable Mention: 
Fauzia Husain, University of Virginia, “Hobbled Leadership. Gender And The Engines Of Authority In The Pakistani Police”

​2018 Shils-Coleman Award Winner: Talia Shiff
This year's winner of the Edward Shils - James Coleman Memorial Award for Best Student Paper is Talia Shiff (Northwestern University) for her paper, “Evaluating the Case: Encounters of Schematic Accordance and Schematic Discordance in Asylum Adjudications.”

Honorable Mentions: 
Arvind Karunakaran, MIT, “Reconfiguring Accountability: Organizational Accountability in the Age of Smartphones and Social Media.”
Mikell Hyman, University of Michigan, “When Policy Feedbacks Fail: 'Collective Cooling' in Detroit's Municipal Bankruptcy”


2017 Shils-Coleman Award Winner: Paige Sweet
This year's winner of the Edward Shils - James Coleman Memorial Award for Best Student Paper is Paige Sweet (University of Illinois-Chicago), for her paper, "Ideology, Bodies, and Trespass Between Feminist Theory and Critical Realism.

Honorable Mention was accorded to Christopher Rea, UCLA.

​
2016 Shils-Coleman Award Winner: HANNAH WOHL
This year's winner of the Edward Shils - James Coleman Memorial Award for Best Student Paper is Hannah Wohl (Northwestern University), for her paper “Community Sense: The Cohesive Power of Aesthetic Judgement” 
 
2015 Shils-Coleman Award Winner: JONAH STUART BRUNDAGE
This year's winner of the Edward Shils - James Coleman Memorial Award for Best Student Paper is Jonah Stuart Brundage (University of California, Berkeley), for  his paper "The Pacification of Hunting: Elite Conflict, State Formation, and Violence in Early Modern England."  

2014 Shils-Coleman Award Winner: ANGELE CHRISTIN
This year's winner of the Edward Shils - James Coleman Memorial Award for Best Student Paper is Angèle Christin (Princeton University) for her paper "Counting Clicks: Commensuration in Online News in the United States and France. " 

2013 Shils-Coleman Award Winner: MARCO GARRIDO
This year's winner of the Edward Shils - James Coleman Memorial Award for Best Student Paper is Marco Garriso (University of  Michigan) for his paper "Place behind Segregating Practices: An Ethnographic Approach to the Symbolic Partitioning of Metro Manila" (Social Forces 2013).

2012 Shils-Coleman Award Winner: MARGARET FRYE
This year's winner of the Edward Shils - James Coleman Memorial Award for Best Student Paper is Margaret Frye (University of California, Berkeley) for her paper  "Bright Futures in Malawi's New Dawn: Educational Aspirations as Assertions of Identity" (AJS, May 2012).

2011 Shils-Coleman Award Winner: ALVARO SANTANA ACUÑA
This year's winner of the Edward Shils - James Coleman Memorial Award for Best Student Paper is Álvaro Santana Acuña (Harvard University) for his paper, "How a Literature Book Becomes a Classic: The Case of García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude."

Honorable Mention for this award goes to Anna Paretskaya (New School for Social Research) for "The Soviet Communist Party and the Other Spirit of Capitalism" (Sociological Theory, December 2010).

2010 Shils-Coleman Award Winner: JEREMY SCHULZ
This year's winner of the Edward Shils - James Coleman Memorial Award for Best Student Paper is Jeremy Schulz (Department of Sociology, University of California at Berkeley) for his paper “The Social and Cultural Construction of the Work-Private Life Boundary in Three Countries: A Comparative Study of the Evening Hours in the Lives of French, Norwegian and American Business Professionals.”

Honorable Mention was accorded to Thomas Buschman, Austin Choi-Fitzpatric, Michael Strand and Brandon Vaidyanathan (University of Notre Dame) for their paper “Causality in Contemporary American Sociology."

2009 Shils-Coleman Award Winner: MICHAEL STRAND
Michael Strand (University of Notre Dame) has been named the winner of the 2009 Edward Shils-James Coleman Memorial Award for Best Student Paper in the Theory Section of the American Sociological Association for his paper ""Institutional Change as a Field Process: American Psychiatry, 1945-1980"

2008 Shils-Coleman Award Winner: ERIN METZ MCDONNELL. 

Erin Metz McDonnell (Northwestern University) has been named the winner of the 2008 Edward Shils-James Coleman Memorial Award for Best Student Paper in the Theory Section of the American Sociological Association  for her paper "Budgetary Units: A Weberian Approach to Consumption" 

Honorable mentions were given to Stefan Bargheer (University of Chicago) for "The Fools of the Leisure Class: Honor, Ridicule, and the Emergence of Animal Protection Legislation in England, 1740-1840" and Becky Hsu (Princeton University) for "Mismatched Moral Dispositions and Economic Logics: Social Collateral, Liability, and Microcredit in Rural China". 

2007 Shils-Coleman Award Winner: WILLIAM WOOD. 

William Wood (Boston College) has been named the winner of the 2007 Edward Shils-James Coleman Memorial Award for Best Student Paper in the Theory Section of the American Sociological Association for his paper "(Virtual) Myths" (Critical Sociology July 2008). 

Honorable mentions were given to Gabriel Abend (Northwestern), Stefan Kluseman (UPenn), and Isaac Reed (Yale). 

2005 Shils-Coleman Award Winner: DANIEL ADKINS. 
Daniel E. Adkins (University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill) has been named the winner of the 2005 Edward Shils - James Coleman Memorial Award for Best Student Paper. 

 2004 Shils-Coleman Award Winner: SCOTT LEON WASHINGTON. 
The 2004 Shils-Coleman Award went to Scott Leon Washington of the Department of Sociology at Princeton University for his paper: "Principles of Racial Taxonomy". 

2003 Shils-Coleman Award Winner: ERIKA SUMMERS-EFFLER. 
This year's winner of the Shils-Coleman Memorial award is Erika Summers-Effler from the University of Pennsylvania, for her paper "The Micro Potential for Social Change: Emotion, Consciousness and Social Movement Formation," Sociological Theory 20(1):41-60, 2002. 

2002 Shils-Coleman Award Winner: ADAM ISAIAH GREEN. 
This year's award goes to Adam Isaiah Green of New York University for his paper "Gay But Not Queer: Toward a Post Queer Study of Sexuality," Theory and Society, August 2002. 

2001 Shils-Coleman Award Winner: CHRISTOPHER STEVENS. 
The 2001 Shils-Coleman award went to Christopher Stevens of the University of Virginia, for his paper titled "The Predictable Nature of the Balinese Cockfight." 

2000 Shils-Coleman Award Winner: ALISON BIANCHI. 
The winner of the Shils-Coleman Memorial Award this year is Alison Bianchi from Stanford University for her paper,"Sentiment and Status Processes: A Test Between the Constitutive and Mediator Models." 

Susan Chimonas, from the University of Michigan, was awarded Honorable Mention for her paper, "Back to the Drawing Board: Irony, Moral Panic Theory, and the Study of Social Problems." 

1999  Shils-Coleman Award Winner: ERIC KLINENBERG. 
The 1999 Shils-Coleman Prize committee awarded this year's prize to Eric Klinenberg  for his paper, "Denaturalizing Disaster: A Social Autopsy of the 1995 Chicago Heat Wave," Theory and Society, 28(2):239-295, April 1999. 

1998 Shils-Coleman Award Winner: WAYNE BREKHUS. 
The 1998 Shils-Coleman Award for the best graduate student paper was awarded to Wayne Brekhus from Rutgers University for his article "A Sociology of the Unmarked: Redirecting Our Focus," sociological Theory (1998) 16:34-51. 

1996 Shils-Coleman Award Winner: TIM BERARD. 

The first ever Shils-Coleman Prize was awarded to Tim Berard of Boston University for his paper "Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, and the Reformulation of Social Theory."





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