ASIMS is pleased to announce that the winner of the 2018 Four Courts Press Michael Adams Prize for best article or essay in Irish medieval studies is Dr Rachel Scott, for her book chapter ‘Socioeconomic change in early medieval Ireland: agricultural innovation, population growth, and human health,’ published in European Archaeology as Anthropology: Essays in Memory of Bernard Wailes (ed. Pam J. Crabtree and Peter Bogucki, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, 2017).

Dr Scott is an assistant professor of anthropology at DePaul University. She is a bioarchaeologist as well, and her work—focused particularly in early Christian and late medieval Ireland—straddles the intersections between skeletal and other archaeological data, history, and anthropology to explore questions concerning identity and the place of disease in human history and culture. Dr Scott is the director of a project on leper hospitals in late medieval Ireland and serves as bioarchaeologist for the Irish Archaeology Field School’s excavations at the Black Friary in Trim, Co. Meath.