Congratulations to Tina van der Vlies, 2014 ISCHE Prize Winner

At the recent ISCHE General Assembly meeting in Istanbul it was announced that Tina van der Vlies had been awarded the 2014 ISCHE Prize.  This award — which from 2015 forward will be named the ISCHE Early Career Conference Paper Award — is given for the best paper presented at the previous ISCHE conference by an early career scholar or post-graduate student.  The award committee takes into consideration the quality of the work, innovation in sources and methods used, contribution to the annual conference theme and overall contribution to the field.

Tina van der Vlies’ paper ‘Multidirectional War Narratives in History Textbooks’ uses Michael Rothberg’s concept of multidirectional memory and applies it to English history textbooks written between 1920 and 1960, and in particular focusing on the defeat of the Armada in 1588 and the Second World War.  van der Vlies demonstrates how textbook authors generated continuity and meaning by providing narrative links between past, present and future. Her approach contributes to textbook research by showing how focusing on the structure of textbook narratives and it is possible to examine how past experiences and future expectations are organized.