Religion and the Arts Book Award
Sugata Ray
University of California, Berkeley
Climate Change and the Art of Devotion: Geoaesthetics in the Land of Krishna, 1550–1850 (University of Washington Press)
From the jury:
Ranging across sculpture, architecture, and two-dimensional works, Sugata Ray’s fascinating study makes the case that environmental interests are interconnected with political, aesthetic, and religious interests. Ray engages readers in current thinking on material culture, new aesthetic thought, cultural geography, and ecological studies. Beautifully produced, this book offers an original investigation and a novel methodology, scrutinizing mosque, temple, shrine, and urban architecture as monuments in the history of devotion in South Asia that register the impact of climate change, ecology, and biodiversity. Though ostensibly about a bygone period, Ray’s study has much to tell us about the here and now.