2025 Kore Award Announcement and Application

Kore Award for Best Dissertation in Women and Mythology 2025

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.

September 4, 2024October 25, 2024

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)

Kore: ASWM’s Award Winning Dissertations

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. 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 our biennial international conference.

We are proud to provide access to this groundbreaking scholarship!

Dr. Dawn Work-MaKinne (2010), “Deity in Sisterhood: The Collective Female Sacred in Germanic Europe” Work-MaKinne Dissertation

Dr. Shannan Palma (2012), “Tales as Old as Time: Myth, Gender and the Fairy Tale in Popular Culture” Palma dissertation

Dr. Mary Beth Moser (2014), “The Everyday Spirituality of Women in the Italian Alps: A Trentino American Woman’s Search for Spiritual Agency, Folk Wisdom, and Ancestral Values” Moser dissertation

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” Williams dissertation

Dr. April Heaslip (2018), “Regenerating Magdalene: Psyche’s Quest for the Archetypal Bride” Heaslip dissertation

Dr. Monica Mody (2020) “Claiming Voice, Vitality, and Authority in Post-Secular South Asian Borderlands”

May 17, 2023January 9, 2024

Hallie Iglehart Austen Receives 2023 Demeter Award for Leadership

See video HERE

In 2010, when ASWM held its first biennial international meeting, we established the Demeter Award for Leadership in Women’s Spirituality as a lifetime achievement award. At this year’s conference, the recipient ie author-activist Hallie Iglehart Austen. Our letter to her reads as follows:

The 2023 Demeter Award is given in recognition of your decades of visionary scholarship as a founding mother of feminist art, culture, and spiritual practice. We recognize your work as a teacher, bringing the message about the Goddess through conferences, workshops and writing. We also recognize your commitment to sustainable living, and your activism for the protection of marine life and the ocean. We honor your celebration of the connections among all things, and the hopeful message you bring at this time of crisis.

Your first book, Womenspirit, A Guide to Women’s Wisdom, published in 1983, grew out of your voyage of discovery, promoting the practice of meditation and the creation of a personal mythology. For your second book, The Heart of the Goddess: Art, Myth and Meditations of the World’s Sacred Feminine, you collected remarkable images and symbols of goddesses from world cultures. It has been hailed as “an exultantly female-centric text whose wisdom is universal.” First published in 1991, this beloved book has now been released in a new edition by Monkfish press.

In the 2000s you were inspired by your work with the divine feminine to focus on initiatives for the protection of oceans and sea life. In 2001 you co-founded Seaflow: Protect Our Oceans to educate people about the dangers of active sonars and other ocean noise to whales, dolphins, and all sea life. In 2010 you initiated All One Ocean: Cleaning Up the Oceans, One Beach at a Time. This work of organizing people to come together on local projects of habitat restoration sets an example of how forming grassroots initiatives can make a difference for the fate of the planet, its oceans and sea creatures.

Your work has combined your knowledge of indigenous Goddess wisdom with activism for the environment in a way that is truly inspirational. Our board and members honor you as one of the premier visionary feminist thinkers of our time, and thank you for your scholarly, literary, healing, and cultural leadership.

The ASWM awards program was established by our co-founder, Patricia Monaghan, to advance the best work in the field of goddess studies. Previous honorees for the Demeter Award have included Margot Adler (2010), Charlene Spretnak (2012), Jean Shinoda Bolen (2014), Elinor Gadon and Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum (2016), Kathy Jones (2018), and Vicki Noble and Judy Grahn (2020).

May 14, 2023January 9, 2024

Dr. Mara Lynn Keller Receives 2023 Saga Award

The ASWM Board of Directors established the Saga Award in 2012 to recognize outstanding contributions to women’s history and culture. The 2023 recipient is Dr. Mara Lynn Keller, recently retired from the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS). Her award letter reads in part:

This award recognizes your service to individual women as a teacher and mentor, and your major contributions to feminist philosophy, Goddess thealogy, the field of Women’s Spirituality, social justice, and global peace.

In your roles as teacher and mentor, you have always put the needs of your students first, demonstrating tremendous spiritual generosity in supporting your students and your peers in their academic and personal endeavors.

During your thirty-year tenure as Professor of Philosophy, Religion, and Women’s Spirituality, you have chaired many Ph.D. dissertations and MA theses, and have helped to generate a treasure trove of knowledge and a love for Women’s Spirituality. As Director of the Women’s Spirituality programs at CIIS, you fostered and developed a program offering an extraordinary curriculum and producing original scholarship that could have emerged no place else.

Your numerous articles and book chapters on your specialty, the Eleusinian Mysteries, have been widely read and influenced a generation of young scholars. We look forward to your forthcoming multi-volume work The Greater Mysteries of Demeter and Persephone and The Eleusinian Mysteries and Greek Goddess Traditions which will encapsulate a lifetime of research and thinking about the Mysteries.

Your commitment to embodied spirituality and multicultural eco-social justice is evidenced in your teaching, writing, and all your work in the world.

The ASWM awards program was established by our co-founder, Patricia Monaghan, to advance the best work in all fields related to goddess studies. Previous Saga Award honorees include Heide Goettner-Abendroth, Genevieve Vaughan, Z Budapest, Donna Read, Peggy Sanday, Arisika Razak, and Jane Caputi.