Category: Awards

ASWM’s mission includes the conferring of awards of excellence in a variety of fields comprising Women and Mythology

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Announcing the Kore Award for Best Dissertation in Women and Mythology

The Kore Award, offered through the Association for Study of Women and Mythology and made possible through the gift of a generous contributor, recognizes excellence in scholarship in the area of women and mythology. It is offered in even-numbered years, for dissertations completed in the previous two calendar years (including defense).

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.

Applications for the 2012 award may be made between November 1, 2011 and February 15, 2012.  Selection is made by a panel of scholars from a variety of disciplines.

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Application for Kore Award for Best Dissertation in Women and Mythology

Deadline for submission: February 15, 2012

Award announcement:  May 12, 2012

Name:

Mailing address:

Email:

Field of Study:

Title of Dissertation:

Date of graduation:

Degree granted by:

Dissertation advisor’s name:

Dissertation abstract:

Please submit this form via email to ASWM.KoreAward@gmail.com with Word attachment of dissertation.  Please have dissertation director email letter of support to same address.

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ASWM Honors Layne Redmond with Brigit Award (2011)

We are honored to announce that we will present our first-ever Brigit Award for Excellence in the Arts to Layne Redmond at our East Coast Symposium on March 12.

Layne Redmond

In the 1980’s, while working with percussionist Glen Velez and conducting research on the history and playing styles of the frame drum (a small hand-held drum of which the tambourine is one notable example), Layne Redmond began to notice that virtually all ancient Mediterranean and middle eastern images featuring this drum showed the player as a woman in a ritual setting. This discovery led to her lifelong work of sharing this knowledge and reviving the practice of goddess priestessing with frame drum. For fifteen years, she researched the history of this drum in religious and healing rites in the ancient Mediterranean world.

ne fruit of Layne’s work, When the Drummers Were Women, a Spiritual History of Rhythm,  was published by Random House in 1997 to great acclaim. This book, a masterful example of independent scholarship, continues to inspire both scholars and musicians.  This book details a lost history of a time when women were the primary percussionists in the ancient world and also explains why they are not today.

Layne assembled, taught, and led The Mob of Angels, a group of women who conducted deeply moving public ritual performances throughout the 1990s and New York City and beyond.

She has numerous exceptional recordings to her credit.  Invoking Aphroditefeatures the poetic works of Sappho, the Pythia Priestesses of Delphi, and the Epitaph of Seikilos (the oldest notated musical composition found to date).

Layne has taught at venues from colleges to retreat centers to gatherings of professional percussionists.

In recent years, she made pilgrimage to Cyprus, where her workshops and retreats have resulted in Cyprian women’s reviving the worship of great goddess Aphrodite via rituals with frame drum.

Layne has also researched and revived the “sacred path of the bee,” the tools of the ancient bee priestesses, and has released Hymns from the Hive, a CD celebrating this path.

Most recently, she has released a 6-DVD Frame Drum Intensive Training Program.

More information about Layne Redmond can be found on her website, throughmany youtube clips, and on her Facebook page.

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Margot Adler Receives 2010 Demeter Award

On April 2010, ASWM conferred the first Demeter Award for Leadership in Women’s Spirituality to journalist and cultural commentator Margot Adler.

Margot Adler is a long-time correspondent for National Public Radio, based in NPR’s New York Bureau. Her reports can be heard regularly on All Things Considered, Morning Edition and Weekend Edition. From 1999-2008, Adler was also the host of NPR’s Justice Talking, a weekly show exploring constitutional controversies in the nation’s courts.

Adler is the author of the ground-breaking study of alternative spirituality in America, Drawing Down the Moon, which introduced nature religions to hundreds of thousands of readers.  She is an active lecturer on pagan studies and women’s spirituality.  The presentation of the first Demeter Award to Adler recognized her influence in changing public perceptions of women’s religions, past and present.

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2010 Kore Award for Best Dissertation

Dawn Work-MaKinne receives first Kore Award

The first Kore Award for Best Dissertation in Goddess Studies was presented  April 24, 2010, at ASWM’s  Green Goddess Conference.  The award went to Dawn E. Work-MaKinne, Ph.D., a graduate of Union Institute & University.  Her dissertation, Deity in Sisterhood: The Collective Sacred Female in Germanic Europe, was commended for its “skilled integration of important German language material critical to studies of mythology.”

Dr. Work-MaKinne received her Doctor of Philosophy in Interdisciplinary Studies in 2010, with a Concentration in Arts and Sciences and a specialization in Women’s Studies in Religion. Continue reading “2010 Kore Award for Best Dissertation”