SPA Stirling Prize

2025 SPA Stirling Prize: Call for Submissions

The Stirling Prize is awarded to a previously published work (this year, it will be awarded for an article) that makes an outstanding contribution to any area of psychological anthropology. 

The Stirling Award was originally established in 1968 by Rebecca and Gene Stirling. Winners of this prestigious award recognizing the best published work in psychological anthropology become members of the selection committee for a three-year rotation.

Articles published between July 15, 2023 and June 15, 2025 are eligible for consideration. Unpublished manuscripts, dissertations, and web publications are not eligible. Edited volumes are not eligible for the book prize. The deadline for submission is June 15, 2025. 

The winner will be announced at the SPA Business Meeting during the 2025 American Anthropological Association annual meeting in New Orleans and will receive a $500 cash prize. 

Nominations may be made by any active member of the American Anthropological Association, including the author. To nominate an eligible article, please send a pdf of the published article, along with a cover letter outlining the article’s contribution to the field of psychological anthropology to SPA Secretary Dr. Bridget M. Haas (bmh7@case.edu) with the subject line “Stirling Prize submission” by June 15, 2025. Submissions that do not include a nomination letter will not be reviewed. 

Any questions regarding the prize can be directed to SPA Secretary, Dr. Bridget Haas at bmh7@case.edu.

All award and selection committees abide by the SPA’s Conflict of Interest and Recusal Policy

Year	Published Work
2024	Allen Tran: A Life of Worry: Politics, Mental Health, and Vietnam’s Age of Anxiety. University of California Press, 2023.
2023	Yahalom, J., Frankfurt, S., & Hamilton, A. B. (2023). Between Moral Injury and Moral Agency​: Exploring Treatment for Men with Histories of Military Sexual Trauma. Medicine Anthropology Theory, 10(1), 1-21.
2022	Merav Shohet. Silence and Sacrifice: Family stories of care and the limits of love in Vietnam (UC Press, 2021)
2022	Chikako Ozawa-De Silva. The Anatomy of Loneliness: Suicide, Social Connection and the Search for Relational Meaning in Contemporary Japan (UC Press, 2021)
2021	von Poser, Anita & Edda Willamowski. The Power of Shared Embodiment. Renegotiating Non/belonging and In/exclusion in an Ephemeral Community of Care. Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 44 (4): 610-828, 2020.
2020	Sarah WIllen. Fighting for Dignity: Migrant Lives at Israel’s Margins, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019.
2019	Nicholas Long. Suggestions of Power: Searching for Efficacy in Indonesia’s Hypnosis Boom. Suggestions of Power: Searching for Efficacy in Indonesia’s Hypnosis Boom. Ethos, 46(1), 70-94.
2018	Naomi Leite, Unorthodox Kin: Portuguese Marranos and the Global Search for Belonging, UC Press, 2017.
2017	Rebecca Lester. Self-governance, psychotherapy, and the subject of managed care: Internal Family Systems therapy and the multiple self in a US eating-disorders treatment center. American Ethnologist, 44: 23–35.
2016	Julia Cassaniti. Living Buddhism: Mind, Self and Emotion in a Thai Community. Cornell University Press 2019.
2015	Kristin Yarris, “‘Pensado mucho’ (‘Thinking too much’)”: Embodied distress among grandmothers in Nicaraguan transnational families,” Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 38: 473-498, 2014.
2014	Geoffrey Saxe, Cultural Development of Mathematical Ideas: Papua New Guinea Studies. University of Cambridge Press
2013	Talia Weiner, “The (Un)managed Self: Paradoxical Forms of Agency in Self-Management of Bipolar Disorder,” Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry, 35(4): 448-483, 2011.
2012	Cheryl Mattingly, The Paradox of Hope: Journeys through a Clinical Borderland (University of California Press)
2011	Anand Pandian, “Interior Horizons: An Ethical Space of Selfhood in South India,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 16(1): 64-83, 2010.
2010	Elly Teman, Birthing a Mother: The Surrogate Body and the Pregnant Self. University of California Press
2009	Rebecca Lester “Brokering Authenticity: Borderline Personality Disorder and the Ethics of Care at an American Eating Disorder Clinic,” Current Anthropology 50(3), 2009.
2009	Angela Garcia, “The E