2024 Morris Award: Call for Nominations
The Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry solicits nominations for the 2024 John and Martha Morris Award for Outstanding Achievement in the History of Modern Chemistry or the History of the Chemical Industry. This award honours the memory of John and Martha Morris, the late parents of Peter Morris, the former editor of Ambix, who has contributed the endowment for this award. The recipient chosen to receive the Morris Award will be expected to deliver a lecture at a meeting of SHAC, where the awardee will be presented with an appropriate framed photograph, picture or document and the sum of £300. The award is international in scope, and nominations are invited from anywhere in the world. Past winners of the Award include Ernst Homburg, Yasu Furukawa, Anthony S. Travis, Mary Jo Nye and Raymond Stokes.
A complete nomination consists of
• a complete curriculum vitae for the nominee, including biographical data, educational background, awards, honours, list of publications, and other service to the profession;
• a letter of nomination summarising the nominee’s outstanding scholarly achievement in either the history of the chemical industry or in the history of recent chemistry (post -1945) and the unique contributions that merit this award; and
• names of two or three individuals for the panel to contact for further information if needed.
Only complete nominations will be considered for the award and the nomination documents must be submitted in electronic form. The Award will be judged by the selection panel on the basis of scholarly publication. All nomination materials should be submitted by e-mail to Peter Morris at doctor@peterjtmorris.plus.com and a separate email which indicates that the material has been submitted should be sent to the same address (a precaution in case of incomplete transmission of documents) for arrival no later than 1 May 2024.
Previous Awards
The Fifth Morris Award was given to Ernst Homburg for his outstanding work on the history of the chemical industry. His contributions include major studies on the history of the madder industry; his seminal paper on the early history of industrial R&D laboratories; his comprehensive history of twentieth-century modern chemistry and the chemical industry embedded within a broader history of the Netherlands in Techniek In Nederland in the Twintigste Eeuw. And, particularly (in the context of this award), his “The Era of Diversification and Globalization (1950-2012)” in Solvay: History of a Multinational Family Firm (CUP, 2013), a book he co-edited with Kenneth Bertrams and Nicolas Coupain.
The fourth Morris Award was given to Yasu Furukawa (formerly of Nihon University) for his outstanding work on the history of chemistry and its relationship with the chemical industry, specifically for Inventing Polymer Science: Staudinger, Carothers, and the Emergence of Macromolecular Chemistry (1998) and Chemists’ Kyoto School: Gen-itsu Kita and Japan’s Chemistry (2017).
The third Morris Award was given to Dr Anthony S. Travis (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) for his contributions to the history of the chemical industry (history of the dye industry and Henrich Caro) and the history of modern chemistry (history of chemical instrumentation and the history of groundwater pollution).
The second Morris Award was given to Professor Mary Jo Nye (Oregon State University) for her work on physical chemistry and the boundary between physics and chemistry in the twentieth century.
The first Morris Award was given to Professor Raymond Stokes (University of Glasgow) for his path-breaking work on the German chemical industry
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