2023 AAR Book Awards

The American Academy of Religion is pleased to announce the 2023 recipients of the Awards for Excellence in the Study of Religion, the Best First Book in the History of Religions, and the Religion and the Arts Book Award.

This annual competition recognizes new scholarly publications that make significant contributions to the study of religion. The awards honor books of distinctive originality, intelligence, and creativity, and these titles affect decisively how religion is examined, understood, and interpreted. Congratulations to the winners!

Religion and the Arts Book Award

William Robert

Unbridled: Studying Religion in Performance (The University of Chicago Press)

From the jury:

Unbridled—the subject of which is Peter Schaffer’s play, Equus—startles, inspires, challenges, and cajoles readers to “do things differently,” particularly when it comes to studying religion. Combining the finesse of a maestro with creative passion reminiscent of liberationist theologians, William Robert encourages multiple approaches to engaging a play as he shakes up religious studies pedagogy. His innovative methodology, unconventional layout, interesting citational practice, and crisp prose each play a role in causing us to read, watch, and listen in new ways, thus to think afresh about the intersection of religion and the arts. Reading Unbridled: Studying Religion in Performance is an unusual experience. The jury recommends it wholeheartedly. 

Best First Book in the History of Religions

William A. Calvo-Quirós

Undocumented Saints: The Politics of Migrating Devotions (Oxford University Press)

From the jury:

Calvo-Quirós offers a risk-taking cultural history that moves between several different academic disciplines to address difficult concepts from sexual abuse to contemporary borderland politics, to the lived and ongoing tradition of vernacular saints, and reconciliation in the life hereafter. This genre-bending book with its often clever, deeply-engaged, place-based, and ethically-motivated outlook showcases the very best of what writing on religion today can be.

 

 

Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion: Analytical-Descriptive Studies

Charles McCrary

Sincerely Held: American Secularism and Its Believers (University of Chicago Press)

From the jury:

A study of tremendous contemporary relevance, Sincerely Held engages the historicity and anthropology of the term “sincerity” as a test for the authenticity of religious belief and examines how the performance of sincerity has dominated the analysis and generation of religion in America from the 19th century to the present.  Bringing together scholarship on secularism, legal history and politics, the book contributes to on-going conversations about the meaning religious freedom, and the distinctive way in which sincerity links the religious and the secular.

Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion: Constructive-Reflective Studies

Karen V. Guth 

The Ethics of Tainted Legacies: Human Flourishing after Traumatic Pasts (Cambridge University Press)

From the jury:

The Ethics of Tainted Legacies is a rich and thoughtful book that has much depth of reflection. Guth shows how many if not all of America’s cherished institutions have a history rooted in oppression and violence, while at the same time serve as valuable resources for supporting human flourishing. She outlines six different ways people have responded to these legacies and presents several case studies to explore the complexity of these situations. The text presents clear and concrete options for how we can acknowledge our pasts, respond to the present, and transform our futures.

Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion: Historical Studies

Mary Dunn

Where Paralytics Walk and the Blind See: Stories of Sickness and Disability at the Juncture of Worlds (Princeton University Press)

From the jury:

Dunn’s work is an exploration of an early modern approach to understanding the meaning of  disability and sickness in the Catholic colonies of Canada during the French regime. Interweaving concrete historical case studies with theoretic thinking, she carefully orchestras a study that coordinates her own experience with cancer and her daughter’s medically defined disability of genetic difference, that reflects the personal within the broader structure of public discourse. Dunn investigates alternative accounts of disability and sickness through the historically objective lens defined by the Jesuit Missionaries, Hospitaller nus, and Catholic holy men and women. She formulates the phrase “embodied difference” for both disability and sickness to illumine these phenomena found between the worlds of indigenous peoples, French rule, and Catholic missions that forms the matrix for her study of “embodied difference.” Combining critical academic analyses of objective primary source materials about the Canadian mission from the collection of serialized publications identified as Jesuit Relations, the chronicles of the Hospitaller nuns of the Hôtel-Dieu in Quebec under the rubric of the curated Histoire de l’Hôtel-Dieu de Quebec, and a variety of published lives of holy men and women with her own personal narrative, Dunn’s innovative approach to theoretic thinking through concrete case cases has resulted in a forward-looking model for disability studies and for the religious history of Canada. From her Canadian subject matter, her merger of the personal narrative with historical record, and careful construction of the relationship between the personal and the public spheres, Dunn provides readers not only with an excellent and thought-provoking historical study of “embodied difference” but promotes an innovative pattern and methodological framework for new directions in religious studies.

Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion: Textual Studies

Max K. Strassfeld

Trans Talmud: Androgynes and Eunuchs in Rabbinic Literature (University of California Press)

From the jury:

Its textual focus, its capacity to keep textual analysis in the foreground, and its daring interrogation of the tradition to forge new ways of thinking about an important topic all deserve recognition. Just the fact that Androgynes and Eunuchs had such a profound impact on the formation of the Rabinnic legal ideas, and the construction of the notion of gender - or rather the proper forms of masculinity - traceable in an array of texts - is fascinating. This immediate relevance, reflected in the choice of the topic, is strengthened by the works playful methodological moves. At the same time, the arguments are enriched by in-depth textual analysis as well as rigorous theoretical discussions.

Award Finalists

In addition to the award winners, the award juries would like to share their 2023 shortlisted finalists in recognition of their exceptional scholarship:

Religion and the Arts Book Award

  • Gregory Erickson, Christian Heresy, James Joyce, and the Modernist Literary Imagination: Reinventing the Word (Bloomsbury Publishing)
  • Jamie H. Ferguson, Reformation Hermeneutics and Literary Language in Early Modern England: Faith in the Language (Palgrave Macmillan)
  • Cécile Fromont, Images on a Mission in Early Modern Kongo and Angola (Penn State University Press)
  • Alejandro Nava, Street Scriptures: Between God and Hip-Hop (University of Chicago Press)
  • Maeera Y. Shreiber, Holy Envy: Writing in the Jewish Christian Borderzone (Fordham University Press)

Best First Book in the History of Religions

  • Rae Erin Dachille, Searching for the Body: A Contemporary Perspective on Tibetan Buddhist Tantra (Columbia University Press)
  • Reyhan Durmaz, Stories between Christianity and Islam: Saints, Memory, and Cultural Exchange in Late Antiquity and Beyond (University of California Press)
  • Justin W. Henry, Ravana's Kingdom: The Ramayana and Sri Lankan History from Below (Oxford University Press)
  • Joy Palacios, Ceremonial Splendor: Performing Priesthood in Early Modern France (University of Pennsylvania Press)
  • Youshaa Patel, The Muslim Difference: Defining the Line between Believers and Unbelievers from Early Islam to the Present (Yale University Press)
  • Max K. Strassfeld, Trans Talmud: Androgynes and Eunuchs in Rabbinic Literature (University of California Press)

Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion, Analytical-Descriptive Studies

  • Simon Coleman, Powers of Pilgrimage: Religion in a World of Movement (NYU Press)
  • Deborah Dash Moore, Vernacular Religion: Collected Essays of Leonard Norman Primiano (NYU Press)
  • Donovan O. Schaefer, Wild Experiment: Feeling Science and Secularism after Darwin (Duke University Press)

Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion, Constructive-Reflective Studies

  • Liz Bucar, Stealing My Religion: Not Just Any Cultural Appropriation (Harvard University Press)
  • Jeffrey J. Kripal, The Superhumanities: Historical Precedents, Moral Objections, New Realities (The University of Chicago Press)
  • Gabriel Levy, Beyond Heaven and Earth: A Cognitive Theory of Religion (The MIT Press)
  • Alejandro Nava, Street Scriptures: Between God and Hip-Hop (The University of Chicago Press)
  • Rima Vesely-Flad, Black Buddhists and the Black Radical Tradition: The Practice of Stillness in the Movement for Liberation (NYU Press)

Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion, Historical Studies

  • Susan Ackerman, Women and the Religion of Ancient Israel (Yale University Press)
  • Reyhan Durmaz, Stories between Christianity and Islam: Saints, Memory, and Cultural Exchange in Late Antiquity and Beyond (University of California Press)
  • Karin Krause, Divine Inspiration in Byzantium: Notions of Authenticity in Art and Theology (Cambridge University Press)
  • Travis Proctor, Demonic Bodies and the Dark Ecologies of Early Christian Culture (Oxford University Press)
  • Jon Stewart, An Introduction to Hegel's Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion: The Issue of Religious Content in the Enlightenment and Romanticism (Oxford University Press)
  • Albert Welter, A Tale of Two Stūpas: Diverging Paths in the Revival of Buddhism in China (Oxford University Press)

Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion, Textual Studies

  • Frederick David Carr, Being and Becoming: Human Transformation in the Letters of Paul (Baylor University Press)
  • Rae Erin Dachille, Searching for the Body: A Contemporary Perspective on Tibetan Buddhist Tantra (Columbia University Press)
  • Yegor Grenbnev, Mediation of Legitimacy in Early China: A Study of Neglected Zhou Scriptures and the Grand Duke Traditions (Columbia University Press)
  • Youshaa Patel, The Muslim Difference: Defining the Line between Believers and Unbelievers from Early Islam to the Present (Yale University Press)
  • Sara Ronis, Demons in the Details: Demonic Discourse and Rabbinic Culture in Late Antique Babylonia (University of California Press)