The Association for Documentary Editing (ADE) invites applications for its annual prize to documentary editors, scholars, and students at midpoint of a project heavily dependent on documentary editing and document sources. Preference is given to persons working on women in uniformed military service or in various military support services (such as the USO) or on the home front during wartime. Advanced students, scholars (including independent scholars), and editors may apply.

The two-part prize of $1500 seeks to facilitate the use of documentary sources for a project or doctoral dissertation at its research stage. It consists of $1,000 toward travel to collections, reproduction of sources, or other costs associated with utilization of documents in research, along with $500 to support the prizewinner’s participation in the annual meeting of the Association for Documentary Editing. Given pandemic restraints on travel, recipients may use the prize for alternative methods of research. Winners are required to report on their work in person or virtually at our scholarly conference. The prize also includes a year’s membership in ADE.

The prize was established in 2019 to honor the life and work of Sharon Ritenour Stevens (1950-2013), Associate Editor of the Papers of George C. Marshall at the George C. Marshall Foundation in Lexington, Virginia. On her own time and money, she also labored on a biography of Lt. Col. Susanna P. Turner, a protégé of George C. Marshall and a member of the first Officers Candidate School for the Women’s Army Corps (WACs) in 1942, as well as one of ten women selected for Command and General Staff School. Unfortunately, this biographical project never reached fulfillment. The Ritenour Stevens prize is established to aid other scholars and editors working in fields allied with her interests but for whom institutional support such as sabbaticals and release-time or research funds is not available.

Specifically, those interests were:

• Uniformed women’s roles in military conflict, declared or undeclared
• Women’s history
• Military history

A submission packet will comprise, as Word documents:

• One-page application letter describing the project’s significance, the applicant’s status (Student? Independent scholar? Contingent/contract faculty? Retired?) and a summary of the planned use of documents in the project.
• Two-page statement about the research and documents under consideration.
• Three-page (maximum) curriculum vitae.
• Letter of recommendation from a primary doctoral advisor or other person involved in project oversight or its publication.

All documents should be double-spaced, except for the letter, which may be single-spaced. The deadline for submissions is 15 November 2021. A committee of five members of the Association for Documentary Editing will judge the submissions. The prizewinner will be announced in mid-January 2022 and introduced to the organization at its annual meeting. Queries may be sent to CDBL@Brown.edu.

At the conclusion of the award period, recipients should provide a one-page (250 words) report to the ADE Council on their use of the prize. A version of this report may be considered for publication in the association newsletter and on the ADE website.