Author: WomenandMyth

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2025 Kore Award Announcement and Application

Kore Award for Best Dissertation in Women and Mythology 2025

Euthydikos-Kore


The Kore Award for Best Dissertation in Women and Mythology is conferred by the Association for the Study of Women and Mythology. The award, established in 2009, is funded by the gift of a generous contributor and carries a $500 prize.  The intention behind its founding is to create awareness of excellence in Women and Mythology, and to provide an organizational framework for supporting graduate students in their work.  The award is presented at the biennial international conference, for dissertations completed and defended in 2022- 2024.  Defense must be completed by December 31, 2024.

Applicants can be from any discipline, including but not limited to literature, religious studies, art or art history, classics, anthropology, and communications. Creative dissertations must include significant analysis of mythology in addition to creative work.  Applicants must be members of ASWM at time of submission.

Past winners of this award include Dr. Dawn Work-MaKinne (2010), Deity in Sisterhood: The Collective Female Sacred in Germanic Europe, Dr. Shannan Palma (2012), Tales as Old as Time: Myth, Gender and the Fairy Tale in Popular Culture, Dr. Mary Beth Moser (2014), The Everyday Spirituality of Women in the Italian Alps, Dr. Annette Williams (2016), Our Mysterious Mothers: The Primordial Feminine Power of Àjê in the Cosmology, Mythology, and Historical Reality of the West African Yoruba, and Dr. April Heaslip (2018), Regenerating Magdalene: Psyche’s Quest for the Archetypal Bride, and Dr. Monica Mody, (2020), Claiming Voice, Vitality, and Authority in Post-Secular South Asian Borderlands.

See these winning dissertations here.

Applicants must be members of ASWM upon submission of entry.  A letter of support from the dissertation chair/director must accompany the application.  Applicants will be urged to also propose a paper for the national conference, and to appear at and present work at the national conference, if they receive the award.  Conference fees will be waived and housing and meals will be covered by ASWM for the winner.

Schedule for 2025 award:

  • Dissertations completed and defended in 2022-2024
  • Application window: Sept. 16, 2024-January 17, 2025
  • Deadline for completion and defense: December 31, 2024
  • Announcement of award winner: February 14, 2025
  • Awarded at conference Saturday March 29, 2025 , Tucson AZ

Application for Kore Award for Best Dissertation in Women and Mythology

Name:

 Mailing address:

 Email:

 Field of Study:

 Title of Dissertation: 

Date of defense:

Institution degree granted by:

Dissertation advisor’s name:

Dissertation abstract:

 Please submit this form via email to awards@womenandmyth.org, with PDF (preferred) or MSWord attachment of dissertation.  Please have your dissertation director email a letter of support, also in PDF or MSWord, to the same address.

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Announcing the 2025 Sarasvati Award for Best Nonfiction Book

The Sarasvati Book Award solicits scholarly nonfiction books published during 2022-2024 in the fields of goddess studies/women and mythology. Named for the Hindu goddess of learning and the creative arts, the award is given by the Association for the Study of Women and Mythology to honor outstanding scholarship and presentation. The award will be presented during ASWM’s 2025 conference in Tucson Arizona.

Submissions and book copies must be received by the Awards Committee no later than February 1, 2025. Books must be published in print, rather than only in e-book format. Nominations must come directly from the publisher; authors should contact their publishers to ask them to submit a work for this award. Each publisher may nominate one work published in 2022-2024. Anthologies and self-published books are not eligible for this award.

 Publishers may contact submissions@womenandmyth.org .

Previous winners of the Sarasvati Award for Nonfiction:

  • 2022: Eruptions of Inanna:  Justice, Gender, and Erotic Power by Judy Grahn (Nightboat Books)
  • 2018: Sheela na gig: The Dark Goddess of Sacred Power by Starr Goode (Inner Traditions)
  • 2016: The Amazons: Lives and Legends of Warrior Women across the Ancient World by Adrienne Mayor (Princeton)
  • 2014: The Dancing Goddesses: Folklore, Archaeology and the Origins of European Dance by Elizabeth Wayland Barber (Norton)
  • 2012: Sacred Display: Divine and Magical Female Figures of Eurasia by Miriam Robbins Dexter and Victor Mair (Cambria Press)
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2025 Conference “Sacred Stories of the Sentient Earth” Call for Proposals

CONFERENCE CALL FOR PROPOSALS

2025  Conference, Association for the Study of Women and Mythology 

“Sacred Stories of the Sentient Earth:  Scholarship for Collaboration, Intervention, and Reciprocity“

March 27-29, 2025

Westward Look Inn, Tucson, Arizona

With the precursor of  Donna Haraway’s early work pointing out how dogs socialized people as much as we them, subsequent work that supports the same for cats, and Haraway’s  Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (2016), a whole new interdisciplinary literature is emerging exploring the hidden lives of plants and animals and the earth herself. To name a few: The Soul of an Octopus (Sy Montgomery), Relational Reality (Charlene Spretnak ), The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth (Zoë Schlanger), What Would Animals Say if We Asked the Right Question? (Vinciane Despret), and Finding the Mother Tree (Suzanne Simard).

Overlooking or dismissing animal, plant , and earth intelligence is rooted in the hubris of Western culture.  With rising consciousness, we turn instead to wisdom from Indigenous Cultures in conjunction with newer scientific discoveries and timeless mythologies to find inspiration and answers to our connection with every aspect of life on our planet.

Our 2025 Conference focuses on meanings and relationships among mythology, science, and culture regarding animals, the green world, the earth and her ecosystems.

With our primary focus on interconnectedness, we welcome academic and artistic presentations concerning mythological, ecological and scientific scholarship. In particular we seek work that addresses collaborations between humans and other sentient beings, foundational myths about the intelligence of nature, and scientific and cultural solutions to transgressions against the balance of nature.

Such topics may include (but are not limited to):

  • Oasis: The Intersection of Hospitality, Survival, and Water in Desert Cultures
  • Dialogues between Western scientific findings and indigenous science and insights
  • Cautionary tales of animal guardians redressing human folly and greed
  • From Drought to Plenty: Strategies for Transforming Scarcity into Abundance
  • Patterns of cross-species companionship in science and contemporary fiction and arts
  • Mythical Waters: Exploring the Legends and Preservation of Life-Giving Springs and Wells
  • Embodying the Divine: Visual and Performing Arts Inspired by the Sacred Feminine
  • The stories in the rocks: rock art, symbolism, and decolonization
  • Comparative mythologies and science about pollinator-plant symbiosis
  • “O Mother Sun” Exploring Female Solar Deities and gender in the cosmos”
  • Mythologies and goddesses of origins, transitions, liminalities, and migration
  • Myths of reciprocity and partnership among sentient beings
  • Drops of Dew and Ephemeral Streams: Sacred Sites of Temporary Waters and Their Cultural Significance
  • Water Wisdom: Integrating Traditional Practices with Modern Water Conservation
  • New Discoveries and Ancient Wisdom: Labyrinths and Rings of Connection

2025 ASWM Call For Proposals

We especially encourage proposals from First Nations women of the Americas,  Indigenous women, internationally, and women of color.

We are accepting proposals for papers, panels, and posters. If you are proposing a poster please put “POSTER” before your title.

All proposal abstracts (no longer than 250 words) and a short (70 words or fewer) bio for each Presenter are to be submitted on this FORM.

See  complete guidelines and timelines: 2025 ASWM Call For Proposals

Check out our tips on writing proposals.

Deadline for papers, panels and posters  has been extended to January 1, 2025.

 

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Announcing Scholar Salon 75: Register for September 12

“Decoding Delphi: Reconstructing the Technology of Divination“

with Dr. Vivien Monroe

Thursday,  September 12, 2024 at 3 pm Eastern Time  

REGISTER HERE

Temple of Apollo at Delphi

In ancient Greece there was an oracle so famous for her accurate,  enigmatic, and poetic pronouncements that kings, generals, and pilgrims flocked  from across empires to consult her. The oracle remained in operation for more  than 1,000 years and counted among its supporters the philosopher Socrates and  the mathematician Pythagoras. She was the Pythia of the Delphic Oracle. 

My research questions are: What were the spiritual technologies used at  the Delphic Oracle? How did the Greeks understand that the Oracle worked, and  what role, if any, did gender play in the successful operation of the oracle? In  order to answer these questions, I explore living divination traditions from West  Africa. My decision to explore African systems of divination stems from my  experience of witnessing numerous divinations in the tradition of the Dagara  people of West Africa over a five-year period, including my own initiation as a  diviner within this tradition.  

The Athena Temple Complex, Delphi

Over the course of my exposure to Dagara divination technology, I noticed  striking parallels between the Dagara tools and artifacts and chronicles of Delphic  tools and artifacts. Because writers living contemporaneously with the Delphic  Oracle did not discuss the details involved in the process of prophecy, we need to use living traditions to help reconstruct those that have been lost over the course  of time. As I show in my dissertation, there is a scholarly tradition for utilizing  comparative analysis. 

I use archaeomythology and feminist theory to provide an original interpretation, deeper exploration, and advanced understanding of those archaeological artifacts that pertained to divination at Delphi. I offer one theory of the spiritual technologies in use at Delphi and hypothesize how these technologies may have facilitated one of the ancient world’s most accurate oracles. The significance of my findings is that by better understanding the spiritual science of divination at the Delphic Oracle, the modern West can better understand its ancient epistemological connection with divination and possibly reintegrate divinatory tools and practices into more of our modern life.

Dr. Vivien Monroe

Vivien Monroe, PhD is an accomplished scholar and educator with a Ph.D. in Women’s Spirituality. Her area of expertise is divination, specifically focusing her dissertation on reconstructing the spiritual technology of the Delphic Oracle. Vivien’s experience extends beyond academia, as she is also a practitioner of divination, having been initiated into three styles of divination within the Dagara tradition, and is also a gifted tarot reader. She remains committed to continuing to learn and share about various divinatory practices. Vivien lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her two doggie fur babies, Luke and Lilith.

 

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Save the Dates for future Salons:

Thursday, September 26, 3 PM Eastern Time

“Feasting on a Hekate Supper at the Crossroads,” with Kay Turner

 

Thursday, October 10, 2024 at 12 NOON

“Exploring Matriarchal Societies:  Encounters and Insights from Around the World,” with Maria Haas

 

Benefit of Membership - ASWM

This Salon recording will also be available to members when processed after the event. 

 

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P3: Cosmic Waters: Origins of Life, Death, and Transformation (Video)

2023 ASWM Conference Panel #3 (Friday May 5th) with Johnathan Vaughn (Aquarius the Water Bearer) Patricia Woodruff (Swan Maidens, Selkies, the Duck and the Devil) and Rev. Areeya Sharpe (Water Whispers in the Desert)

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