The Yale H. Ferguson Award, presented by International Studies Association-Northeast, recognizes the book that most advances the vibrancy of international studies as a pluralist discipline. Any book or edited volume published within the field of international studies in the previous calendar year is eligible for consideration.

LEARN MORE about Dr. Ferguson at the bottom of the page.

Details

Please click to expand any heading below for more information.

Recipient Criteria

Recipients must be current members of ISA.
Members of the award committee, as well as the current program chair for ISA-NE, are ineligible for the award.

Prize

The recipient will receive $250 and a plaque.

Selection Process

That it makes an outstanding contribution to concept-formation, theoretical analysis, or methodological issues in the study of world politics.
That it contributes to the status of international studies as an intellectually pluralist field.

Nomination/Application Instructions

Nominations should be emailed to the committee chair accompanied by a brief letter explaining why a work deserves consideration for the award. Authors may nominate themselves.
A copy of each book must be sent to each member of the committee, with the line “Yale H. Ferguson Award, c/o” at the top of each address.
Nominations are due by June 15th and books must be received by July 1, 2021.

Recipients

Congratulations to the 2020 recipient of the Yale H. Ferguson Award, Cara Daggett for The Birth of Energy: Fossil Fuels, Thermodynamics and the Politics of Work! An honorable mention was given to Benjamin Meiches for The Politics of Annihilation: A Genealogy of Genocide. See the previous recipients below.

Past Recipients

Year	Recipient	Title
2020	Cara Daggett	The Birth of Energy: Fossil Fuels, Thermodynamics and the Politics of Work
2019	Noelle Brigden and Einar Wigen	The Migrant Passage: Clandestine Journeys from Central America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2018) and State of Translation: Turkey in Interlingual Relations (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2019)
2018	Catherine Lu	Justice and Reconciliation in World Politics
2017	Cynthia Weber	Queer International Relations
2016	Ayten Gundogdu	Rightlessness in an Age of Rights: Hannah Arendt and the Contemporary Struggles of Migrants
2015	Séverine Autesserre (Co-Winner)	Peaceland: Conflict Resolution and the Everyday Politics of International Intervention
2015	Michael G. Findley, Daniel L. Nielson & J.C. Sharman (Co-Winner)	Global Shell Games: Experiments in Transnational Relations, Crime, and Terrorism
2013	Daniel Levine	Recovering International Relations: The Promise of Sustainable Critique
2013	Zheng Wang	Never Forget National Humiliation: Historical Memory in Chinese Politics and Foreign Relations
2012	Michael Barnett	"Empire of Humanity: A History of Humanitarianism" (Cornell University Press, 2011)
2011	Patrick Thaddeus Jackson	"The Conduct of Inquiry in International Relations: Philosophy of Science and its Implications for the Study of World Politics" (Routledge, 2011)
2010	Luis Cabrera	"The Practice of Global Citizenship" (Cambridge University Press, 2010)

About Yale H. Ferguson

Yale H. Ferguson, a Professor at Rutgers-Newark, contributed over many years to the intellectual vibrancy of the International Studies Association-Northeast. During his distinguished career, he mentored a long and diverse list of graduate students and junior faculty from schools around the country. Although he began his career as a Latin American specialist, his philosophic and historical interests soon transformed him into one of the most visible theorists in international relations. In his long and productive collaboration with Richard Mansbach, Ferguson published seven books and numerous articles and book chapters dealing with the evolution of the discipline and its theoretical foundations and the collaboration continues with two additional books forthcoming. Beginning in the 1970s and influenced by the pioneering work of Thomas Kuhn and James Rosenau, Ferguson and Mansbach rejected realism and its emphases on power, rationality, and state-centricity, questioned the immutability of the Westphalian state and its role in global politics, and denied the contention that facts and values were separable. Instead, values were regarded empirical facts that determined the questions theorists posed and the selection of other facts in the course of strategically simplifying a complex political universe. These concerns make it difficult to “label” Ferguson or this body of scholarship. Its criticism of state-centric premises led some to define it as “liberal,” even “utopian.” Its emphasis on history as a means of discerning change and discarding the static claims of realist thinking predicted constructivist thought, while its focus on changing boundaries, interdependence, and transnationalism predictably led to contemporary globalization discourses. Perhaps, the best description of Ferguson is that he is a genuine “pluralist.”

Committee Members

Andrew Ross | Chair
714 Murdock Rd.
Baltimore, MD 21212

Jack Amoureux | Member
Department of Politics and International Studies
Wake Forest University
Kirby Hall 309
P.O. Box 7568
Winston-Salem, NC 27109

Kate Seaman | Member
289 Main Street
Easthampton, MA 01027

Swati Srivastava | Member
Department of Political Science
Purdue University
Beering Hall
100 N. University St.
West Lafayette, IN 47907

Award Chairs, please review dates to ensure deadlines are met.

Key Dates