CFP: Vulcan Early-Career Prize: social history of military technology

The Vulcan Early-Career Prize for the best article in the field of social history of military technology

Vulcan: The International Journal of the Social History of Military Technology invites submissions for its inaugural Early-Career Prize. The winning article as judged by the editorial board will be published in the 2018 volume (6) of Vulcan, and will officially be announced as the prize winner in the journal volume as well as on the journal webpage. The winner will receive a cash prize of €500. The prize is open to graduate students who are currently registered at a higher education institute, or to those who have obtained their doctoral degree after January 1, 2012.

Vulcan is a peer-reviewed journal, appearing in one issue per year, that addresses military technology as both agent and object of social change. Vulcan publishes original research articles, book reviews, and short notes and communications that go beyond traditional hardware stories of military technology. Academic and popular histories of weapons, warships and other physical manifestations of warfare have tended to assume a strictly utilitarian or rational basis for invention, innovation and use. Such approaches may ignore some very important questions: What are the social values, attitudes, and military (and non-military) interests that shape and support or oppose these technologies? What are the consequences of gender, race, class, and other aspects of the social order for the nature and use of military technology? Or, more generally, how do social and cultural environments within the military itself or in the larger society affect military technological change? And the indispensable corollary: how does changing military technology affect other aspects of society and culture?

Vulcan casts a wide net, taking a very broad view of technology and its wider ramifications that encompasses not only the production, distribution, use, and replacement of weapons and weapon systems, but also communications, logistic, scientific, medical, and other technologies of military relevance. Papers may range widely in space and time, and we welcome especially submissions on non-Western and premodern topics. Themes might include the ways in which social factors (including politics and economics), and other extra-military factors have influenced and been influenced by the invention, R&D, diffusion, or use of military technologies; the roles that military technologies play in shaping and reshaping the relationships between institutions; historiographical or museological topics that discuss how military technology has been analyzed, interpreted, and understood in other fields, other cultures, and other times.
Submission Requirements

Articles should be based extensively on primary research, must not have been previously published in another form or outlet, and should not be currently under consideration by another journal or book series. Essays (between 8,000 and 12,000 words) should be written in American English, and conform to The Chicago Manual of Style (15th Edition). Papers should include an abstract of approximately 150 words and 5–8 keywords. Detailed submission instructions can be found at brill.com/vulc. Submissions for the prize should be submitted online through the Vulcan Editorial Manager by 31 December 2017. In order to allow for sufficient time for the peer review process, early submissions are welcomed.

For further information, please contact the Editor-in-Chief, Steven A. Walton at sawalton@mtu.edu.