It is with great pleasure that we announce the winner of the 2019 Ian Lancashire Promise Award — the award goes to Emese Ilyefalvi for “Looking through the Hungarian verbal charm corpus.” A visiting scholar at the Wirth Institute for Austrian and Central European Studies at the University of Alberta, Emese Ilyefalvi is a PhD candidate based at Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary. A folklorist, she has a background in early-modern witch trials. Her digital humanities scholarship centres around the development of a database of 6000 Hungarian charms from the earliest written records to the present day. This work brings together material from everyone including household management books, marginalia, early-modern witch trails, and oral testimony. The project will be further expanded through sentence level TEI markup and the analysis the markup enables. The Ian Lancashire Promise Award committee was particularly impressed by Ms. Ilyefalvi’s dynamic and confident presentation and her engaging blend of specific project details and larger theoretical precepts and methodological implications.
Thank you to this year’s reviewers. Are you interested in supporting CSDH/SCHN graduate students by reviewing for the Lancaster award? Either vice-president would be glad to be in touch.