We are delighted to confirm that the 2019 Postgraduate Paper Prize was won by Katrina-Louise Moseley. She is an AHRC-funded PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge with an interest in using ‘ordinary’ consuming practices to explore human relationships and emotions.

Katrina’s prize-winning paper drew on a 1982 Mass Observation directive to explore the combination of sensory, social and emotional forces in taste and food preference. Her wider PhD project uses self-narratives to consider the intersections between food, body weight and society from mid- to late-twentieth century Britain. Her earlier work, undertaken at Durham university, considered attitudes towards female alcohol consumption during the middle part of the century. Alongside her research, Katrina is a co-founder of the Cambridge Body and Food Histories Group, an interdisciplinary network for postgraduate researchers.

Georgina Brewis, the Honorary Secretary of the Social History Society, described Katrina’s paper as ‘an impressive piece offering a rich blend of social and cultural history’.

After accepting her prize, Katrina said:

I’m really thrilled to have been awarded this prize. This is my first time attending the Social History Society conference and I’ve learnt a great deal from the rich array of papers on offer, particularly Josh Doble’s paper on the place of the sensory in decolonisation narratives, which has sparked lots of new questions for me. The conference has been a great opportunity to meet like-minded scholars, who are working on similar themes and issues, but with different methodologies and across vastly different time periods.

The second prize was awarded to Başak Akgül (Özyeğin University) for the paper ‘Beyond Resistance and Compliance: Adaption Strategies of the Hill Communities in the Ottoman Empire, 1870-1910’.