Cambridge student wins 2022 World Christianities Essay Prize

Congratulations to PhD student Kate Tilson who has won the World Christianities Essay Prize awarded by the Journal of Ecclesiastical History for her essay entitled “Childbirth and Emerging Missionary Information Networks in Britain and the South Pacific.” The essay will be published in The Journal of Ecclesiastical History in 2023.

Kate writes - This article explores how childbirth shaped the information networks that London Missionary Society missionaries helped develop between Britain and the South Pacific in the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries. As the evangelicals experienced challenging births in the South Pacific, they sought new forms of cultural knowledge, which they reproduced in their reports to the Society. Part of these knowledge networks included books on medicine and midwifery, which the missionaries ordered from Britain. From the 1820s, moreover, some missionaries came to collate early forms of ethnographical research on Pacific peoples, which examined Pacific ways of birth and postnatal care. 

More information on the award can be found on the Journal website