STEP - Science and Technology in the European Periphery

History of Education Society (UK)
Anne Bloomfield Book Prize

The 2010 winner of the triennial Book Prize was announced on 27 November:

Professor Ruth Watts,
for
Women in Science: A Social and Cultural History
(London: Routledge, 2007)

Ruth Watts is Emeritus Professor in History of Education at the
University of Birmingham. She has an international reputation for her
research on social and cultural histories of women in education and
for her long-standing promotion of historical research on gender and
education, through research and publication, through HES (UK) and
through ISCHE, the International Standing Conference on History of
Education.

Women in Science is commended for its ambitious scope and impressive
achievement in ranging widely across time and space, and across
intellectual disciplines. Its comprehensive and sympathetic
interpretation of many scholars’ work together with material from
Professor Watts’ own research produces a highly original synthesis,
with arguments drawing on both international and local evidence. In
recovering the participation in science at all levels, of women from a
variety of social and economic backgrounds, she develops a powerful
argument that understanding the past is crucial to developing women’s
contribution to science in the future. The book’s reception in
national and international journals for social history, history of
science, gender and education, has been consistently enthusiastic and
has drawn attention to the accessibility of Ruth Watts’ writing to
many audiences of specialists and non-specialists alike. It is
destined to become a key text for generations of scholars to come.

The Prize was presented in London at the 43rd annual conference of
the History of Education Society UK.

History of Education Society (UK) Anne Bloomfield Book Prize
Initiated in 1989, and since 2007 re-named the Anne Bloomfield Book
Prize in memory of Anne's chairing of the 2004 and 2007 panels, this
prize has honoured some outstanding contributions to the field:

1986-1988: Margaret Bryant, The London Experience of Secondary
Education (London : Athlone, 1986)

1989-1991: David Vincent, Literacy and Popular Culture: England
1750-1914 (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press , 1989)

1992-1994: R.J.W.Selleck, James Kay-Shuttleworth: Journey of an
Outsider (Ilford: Woburn Press , 1994)

1995-1997: Kathryn Castle, Britannia’s Children: Reading
Colonialism through Children’s Books and Magazines (Manchester :
Manchester University Press, 1996)

1998-2000: Jane Martin, Women and the Politics of Schooling in
Victorian and Edwardian England (Leicester: Leicester University
Press, 1999)

2001-2003: Harold Silver, Higher Education and Opinion Making in
Twentieth Century England (London: Woburn Press, 2003)

2004-2006: Rebecca Rogers, From the Salon to the Schoolroom:
Educating Bourgeois Girls in Nineteenth-Century France (University
Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press)