The Roberta Kevelson Award, established in 2000, honors the best student paper presented at the SSA annual meeting (if, in the committee’s judgment, a paper has been submitted that is worthy of this award). The Kevelson Award consists of: (1) the permanent title “Kevelson Award Recipient”; (2) Presentation of the winning paper at the Annual Conference; (3) Publication of the paper in Semiotics Yearbook (subject to corrections and improvements, with page costs waived if any are levied); (4) A free membership in SSA for the year following the Award; and (5) A “Certificate of Award” presented by the KAC Chair or Committee Member at an appropriate time during the Annual Conference.
Roberta Kevelson (4 November 1931 —28 November 1998; born Fall River, Massachusetts, USA) was a semiotician and an important authority on the pragmatist theories of Charles Sanders Peirce. A Founding Member of the SSA, Kevelson was awarded the second Ph.D. in Semiotics (Brown University 1978) in the USA (after Charls Pearson). Her main academic career was at Pennsylvania State University (Reading) where she served as the executive director of the Center for Semiotic Research in Law, Government and Economics, and where she received the Amoco Award for Outstanding Teaching in 1986. She also taught at The College of William and Mary and had a research appointment at Yale University. She was a research fellow at Princeton University and Victoria College of the University of Toronto and a university scholar at Cambridge. She was a pre-eminent Peirce scholar and is best remembered for founding the international research subdiscipline of Semiotics of Law, i.e., Legal Semiotics. She was the President of the Semiotic Society of America in 1996 and held memberships in the International Association for Semiotics of Law, the American Philosophical Association, the American International Society for the Philosophy of Law, the Christopher Wren Society, and the Kingspoint Garden Club. In addition to her many scholarly works, she had published short stories, poems and plays. She was also notably responsible for securing the archive “Semiotic Society of America Records, 1970-1992”, a repository currently housed in the Special Collections Library of the Pennsylvania State University. Among her published works are High Fives, The Inverted Pyramid, The Law as the System of Signs and, possibly her most significant work, Peirce and the Mark of the Gryphon.
Award Selection Criteria
- Topic: original and promising research subject matter in the discipline of Semiotics
- Focus: theoretical focus on a particular semiotician, school of semiotics, or logic model, with related sophisticated analyses of some theoretical concept relevant to Semiotics
- Research: evidence of systematic research in the primary and secondary literature, including self-citation of previous research (published or unpublished) relevant to the paper’s subject-matter
- Organization: clear logic demonstrating analysis and synthesis with problematic and thematic limitation
- Writing: clarity, conciseness, appropriate primary and secondary source citation
- Application: valuable contribution to understanding the broader discipline of Semiotics
The Kevelson Award Committee, 2021
André De Tienne (Chair), IUPUI
Susan Mancino, Saint Mary’s College, Notre Dame, IN
Steven Skaggs, University of Louisville
Kevelson Award Recipients
2023
No award granted
2022
No contest
2021
Jamila Farajova
University of Tartu, Estonia, and University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain
“The Vehicle of the Process of Semiosis”
2020
No contest
2019
John Montani
University of Oregon
“Rhythm and the Semiotic in Kristeva”
2018
Martin Macháček
Charles University, Prague
“The Peircean Interpretation of Probability in Quantum Mechanics”
2017
Karolína Šedivcová
Charles University, Prague
“Aristotle’s Theory of Sign from the Perspective of De Anima”
2016
Michal Karľa
Charles University, Prague
“Peirce’s 1865 ‘Proofs’ of Symbolization”
2015
Timothy Michaels
Duquesne University
“The Signs in Nature: Toward an Emersonian Semiotic Theory”
2014
John Tredinnick-Rowe
University of Exeter Medical School
“The Paradox of Giving: Insights into the Gift Economy”
2013
Cheryl Williams
York University
2012
Cameron Kunzelman
Mercer University
“Pain Can Go Both Ways: The Politics of Comic Book Violence”
2009
James Eric (Jay) Black
Mercer University
“Amoozin’ but Confoozin’: Comic Strips as a Voice of Dissent in the 1950s.”
2007
Javier Clavere
University of Cincinnati
“The Paradigm Shift Theory, Sacred Signs and Worship Systems”
2006
Benjamin A. Smith
University of West Florida
“Incommensurability, Intersubjectivity, and Phenomenological Dimensions of the Pyramid of Anthroposemiosis”
2003
Ryan Maydan
University of Ottawa
“The Semiotics of Chance”
2002
Joe Martin
Bradley University
“In Bounds or Out of Bounds? The Academic Possibilities of John Deely’s Four Ages of Understanding”
2001
Lauren Langner
University of St. Thomas, Houston
“The Anomalous Ascent: Contemplation as a New Semiotic”
2000
Inna Semetsky
Columbia University
“The Adventures of a Postmodern Fool, or the Semiotics of Learning”
