John A. Lent Prize

Call for the 2025 John A. Lent Prize for Award in 2026

The John A. Lent Prize is awarded for the best conference paper on Malaysia, Singapore, or Brunei presented at the AAS annual conference each year. The prize will be awarded at the following year’s AAS Annual Conference. The Craig A. Lockard Prize carries with it a US$250.00 award.

At the 2026 AAS Annual Meeting in Vancouver Canada, we intend to award the prize to the best conference paper presented at the 2025 AAS Annual Meeting in Columbus, Ohio. The submission does not need to be a fully polished paper, but of course, the more finished the better. The awardee will be notified by the end of the year. The committee may also give out an “Honorable Mention” award.

The awardee will be given the opportunity to highlight the paper through a short submission to Berita, our bi-annual newsletter. Options include: a summary of the paper presented at the conference, or a “field notes” submission of your research process that led to the paper.

If you would like to submit your conference paper for consideration for the award, please send a PDF version of the manuscript to the Lent Prize committee by June 30, 2025. Please also cc the MSB Chair at msbstudiesgroup@gmail.com. The awardee does not have to attend the 2026 Association for Asian Studies annual conference held in March 2026 in Vancouver, Canada.

John A. Lent is the founding editor of Berita in 1975 to 2002, and founding Chair of the Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei (MSB) Studies Group in the AAS from 1975 to 1982. He taught at the college/university level for 51 years, beginning in 1960, including stints as the organizer of the first journalism courses at De La Salle College in Manila (1964–1965); founder and coordinator of the first mass communications program in Malaysia at Universiti Sains Malaysia (1972–1974); Rogers Distinguished Chair at University of Western Ontario (2000); visiting professor at Shanghai University, Communication University of China, Jilin College of the Arts Animation School, and Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia. In the United States he taught in West Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming, before joining the Temple University faculty, where he was full professor from 1976 to 2011. He has authored or edited eighty-seven books, including Asian Comics, Asian Political Cartoons, and Comics Art in China, all published by University Press of Mississippi. He founded and serves as the publisher and editor-in-chief of International Journal of Comic Art.

The AAS MSB Lent Prize Committee are:

Chair – Darren Wan, Cornell University dw597@cornell.edu

Member – Patricia Sloane-White, University of Delaware, pswhite@udel.edu

Member – Margaret Sarkissian, Smith College msarkiss@smith.edu

Member – Jo Ann Wang, Pitzer College, JoAnn_Wang@pitzer.edu