New publishing awards ensure Faculty of Arts authors reach goals

The Faculty of Arts and the Calgary Institute for the Humanities collaboratively launched two awards last year to support new publications and boost faculty monograph output. The Book Workshop Awards and the Monograph Completion Group Awards aid with the completion of new monographs by Faculty of Arts researchers across all disciplines. The second round of awards is underway, with the application deadline for the 2025-26 academic year closing on March 17, 2025.

“The Faculty of Arts houses disciplines in which monographs are important scholarly contributions, and we identified that many faculty would publish their first book, but then their second book would take a long time. Many first books come out of a dissertation which receives lots of feedback, but mid-career those mechanisms don’t automatically exist,” says Dr. Amelia Kiddle, Associate Dean (Research and Communities), Faculty of Arts. “We are investing in our faculty members to help them successfully publish significant field-changing books. This is a unique program at UCalgary, and while some universities support monographs, this is not common practice.”

The 2025 Book Workshop Awards provide the opportunity for constructive feedback to faculty members to enable them to revise a substantially completed draft of their monograph for publication. These awards allow authors to bring together three experts of their choosing to provide substantive feedback on a draft of their monograph in a workshop format. The award funds honoraria of $500 each for these specialists to participate by reading the manuscript and providing feedback.

The Monograph Completion Group Awards support faculty working on monographs by placing them into interdisciplinary writing groups that meet over the course of the academic year to discuss their works-in-progress. Upon completion of the award year, participants who submit their manuscript to a press for review will receive a $1500 grant to use towards the costs associated with publishing a book.

Two recipients of the 2024 monograph awards speak about their experience:

2024 Book Workshop Award
Recipient: Rachel Friedman, Associate Professor (teaching), Arabic Language and Muslim Cultures, School of Languages,  Linguistics, Literatures and Cultures
Research area: The Qur’ān and the classical period of Islam and its intellectual traditions.

“The Book Workshop Award was an excellent opportunity that came at exactly the right moment for me. It was the missing piece I needed to get my book ready for publication,” says Dr. Rachel Friedman. “A monograph is a big commitment that takes lots of time and energy. I had been working on my own with a peer feedback group, but I was missing feedback from senior scholars in my field. Having this award from UCalgary has taken my scholarship to the next level, and the honorarium provided to participating scholars for their time and expertise gave me a platform to approach the key people I wanted feedback from.”

2024-25 Monograph Completion Group Award
Recipient: Morgan Vanek, Associate Professor, Department of English
Research area: The politics of weather in 18^th century literature

“Right now, both at the University of Calgary and across North America, research in the humanities and arts disciplines is under pressure, so I have found it very moving to see the Faculty of Arts make this type of investment in fields that require monographs. When I learned about the Monograph Completion Group, I was at a conference with a number of other colleagues at the same career stage, and everyone I told about it said they wished their institution would support something like this, too” says Dr. Morgan Vanek. “The grant money is a great incentive, of course – but in my view, it’s the institutional commitment to establishing an interdisciplinary discussion and accountability group for long-term writing projects that makes UCalgary a leader in knowledge production.”