APSA Awards: Submit Nominations for the 2018 Merze Tate Award

The Merze Tate Award (before 2017, known as the Helen Dwight Reid Award) is awarded annually for the best dissertation successfully defended during the previous two years in the field of international relations, law, and politics. It carries a prize of $750.

Merze Tate was the first African American woman studying international relations to receive a doctoral degree in Government (1941, Radcliffe). She published many books and articles, including The Disarmament Illusion: The Movement for a Limitation of Armaments to 1907 (New York: MacMillan and Co., 1942), The United States and Armaments (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1948), and The United States and the Hawaiian Kingdom: A Political History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965). Most of her career was spent as a professor of History at Howard University, although she also traveled as a foreign correspondent. Tate and her work have been profiled in such publications as PS: Political Science and Politics (profile written by Maurice C. Woodard and published in the January 2005 issue) and White World Order, Black Power Politics: The Birth of American International Relations, by Robert Vitalis (Cornell University Press, 2015). Tate is the subject of at least one intellectual biography in progress. In choosing to name the award after Merze Tate, the committee noted that “her perseverance in the face of significant structural obstacles is inspiring and particularly meaningful for a dissertation award.”

Nominations must be received by Monday, February 12, 2018. Submit a nomination here.


About the 2017 Award Recipient
Rochelle Terman
is a post-doctoral fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science in 2016 with a designated emphasis in Gender & Women’s Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research examines international norms, gender and advocacy, with a focus on the Muslim world, using a mix of quantitative, qualitative and computational methods.