Best First Book - The Mediterranean Seminar Book Prize 2021

The Mediterranean Seminarannounces the 2021 prize for the best first book in Mediterranean Studies.
Eligible publications are dated 2016—2020. 
The submission deadline is 1 January 2021. 
The winner will be announced on 1 May 2021 and, funding permitting, will be invited to attend the Mediterranean Seminar workshop in fall 2021.  
A "first book" is the first scholarly or scholarly-oriented trade book an author has published (not including editions and translations, which are not eligible for this prize). 

Criteria
The entries submitted should reflect the goals and mission of the Mediterranean Seminar; namely to promote the Mediterranean region as a framework for scholarly inquiry and pedagogy. The Mediterranean Seminar is dedicated to the study of Mediterranean societies and cultures and their role in World History and the History of "the West." Located at the intersection of three continents, the premodern Mediterranean was a shared environment characterized by tremendous ethnic and religious diversity and by the intensity of cultural, economic, and political exchange. Among Africans, Asians, and Europeans, Christians, Muslims, and Jews, and others, both conflict and peaceful communication encouraged acculturation and spurred innovations that transformed the societies of the Mediterranean and their continental neighbors. Though because of the dominance of modern national paradigms, the weight of teleological historical traditions, and assumptions about the rigidity of ecumenical divisions, the premodern Mediterranean is frequently regarded as an anomaly, it was central to the historical developments and cultural transformations that produced Modernity.
See www.mediterraneanseminar.org for details.

We are most interested in books that break new ground conceptually or methodologically, are comparative and/or interdisciplinary, that emphasize the intercultural/interregional/inter-religious contact, that are “of” rather than merely “in” the Mediterranean. Although we focus on the pre-Modern, books ranging from any period will be considered. Books from any of the relevant Humanities and Social Sciences disciplines are welcome, including but not limited to all fields of history, art and material culture, literary and cultural studies, anthropology, and sociology. The Mediterranean world is broadly construed as the region centered on the sea, but including connected hinterlands in Europe, Sub-Saharan Africa, the western Indian Ocean, the Near East and Central Asia.

For contest details and to enter go to http://www.mediterraneanseminar.org/book-prizes