2024 AAR Book Award Winners
About
The American Academy of Religion is pleased to announce the 2024 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
Sinem Arcak Casale
Gifts in the Age of Empire: Ottoman-Safavid Cultural Exchange, 1500–1639
(The University of Chicago Press)
From the jury:
The jury delighted in this work’s lovely prose, its thick descriptions, its elegant images, its high-quality reproductions—even the feel of the pages themselves. Thoroughly researched, wide-ranging, and strikingly handsome, this volume illuminates the role played by the arts in intra-Islamic relations as it accounts for contrasting complex conceptual approaches to religion taken by Ottoman sultans and Safavid shahs. Employing a fragile and ephemeral archive, Sinem Arcak Casale offers a portrait of the role of material objects as gifts in negotiating political power within competing Islamic polities in the early modern Islamic world. Having taken into consideration the “physical absence” of art and artifacts, it is precisely through attention to materiality that Casales makes a fresh contribution. The emphasis placed by Gifts in the Age of Empire on particular histories, geographies, and viewpoints transports the reader (whether scholar or non-specialist) beyond a “western” mindset, facilitating encounters with other perspectives on the intersection of religion and the arts. It is indeed a treasure of a vehicle for such a journey.
Best First Book in the History of Religions
Elizabeth O’Brien
Surgery and Salvation: The Roots of Reproductive Injustice in Mexico, 1770-1940
(The University of North Carolina Press)
From the jury:
With critical historical acumen and powerful storytelling, Surgery and Salvation examines the racial and eugenic logics in various forms of medical practice and their theological justifications over 170 years in the history of Mexico. The remarkable timeliness of this study of surgical polities and reproductive governance resides in its foci on issues of race, gender, class, sexuality, and the nation. O’Brien's study decisively addresses not only the religious reflections and theological concerns that often converged and ultimately coevolved with obstetric surgical practices and protocols, but also the ways in which the bodily integrity and autonomy of girls and women were left at the mercy of the priests, surgeons, eugenicists, and others who were perpetrators of reproductive injustice. This book uncovers obstetric racism with rigorous research and revelatory prose, and the result is a powerful historical narrative that also serves as a brilliant methodological and theoretical model for future studies of religion and reproductive justice.
Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion: Analytical-Descriptive Studies
Molly Farneth
The Politics of Ritual
(Princeton University Press)
From the jury:
Molly Farneth’s book offers an engaging overview of ritual studies and a new insight into ritual as politics. Farneth applies ritual theory to public social spaces, beginning with an example in Manhattan where the Jewish Kaddish for mourning was performed in public in the streets as a political act. A wide range of further examples are interwoven with concerns of justice and democracy, inclusion and exclusion. The Politics of Ritual builds on the theories of Catherine Bell and Pierre Bourdieu, in particular, and takes them further by arguing that ritual is both transformative and being transformed. This book is both useful as a primer on ritual theory and for its application to political ritual.
Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion: Constructive-Reflective Studies
Loriliai Biernacki
The Matter of Wonder: Abhinavagupta's Panentheism and New Materialism
(Oxford University Press)
From the jury:
Loriliai Biernacki makes a fascinating case for the contemporary relevance of Abhinavagupta’s 11th-century Indian philosophy, which she reads closely in conversation with questions and perspectives of New Materialism. By analyzing wonder (camatkāra) as rooted in the material rather than in a cognitive faculty, The Matter of Wonder is both striking and original in its approach. The links she draws with viruses and AI in particular make this work pertinent and fresh. It is overall a very sophisticated and provocative book.
Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion: Historical Studies
Carlos Eire
They Flew: A History of the Impossible
(Yale University Press)
From the jury:
In They Flew: A History of the Impossible, Carlos Eire effectively brings to culmination an idea that has engaged his thinking and his research throughout the almost 40 years since he first encountered a factual pronouncement regarding saintly levitation—a pronouncement that jarred with the rationalism and objective constructs that have pervaded academic studies in history, philosophy, and religion since the Enlightenment. The centrality of the definition, history, and meaning of levitation, bilocation, and the demonic has effectively been relegated to the categories of superstition, magic, and for lack of a better adjective “the non-rational.” Eire’s decades of thinking about the cultural geography of the complexity of “the impossible” has resulted in an elegantly written and carefully structured work of serious scholarship incorporating the lived experiences and realities of religious faith within the thematic of what shapes the study of history as well as the study of religion. Although centered in the Christian traditions of western Europe, They Flew: A History of the Impossible proffers a road map for these same issues and motifs within world religions by allowing us—scholars and students alike—to question our preconceptions about superstition and miracles, the divine and the demonic, and magic and theology within and without the frameworks of institutional religion before and after the rationalism and objectivity of Enlightenment thinking. Eire has written what the Historical Studies Award Jury identified as a “teachable book” that engages while it enlightens, that promotes the author’s claim that his book raises more questions than it answers. All in all, this is a highly innovative study of an understudied, if not rarely discussed, topic that will entice and edify students, scholars, and the larger spectrum of interested readers alike.
Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion: Textual Studies
Mbaye Lo and Carl W. Ernst
I Cannot Write My Life: Islam, Arabic, and Slavery in Omar Ibn Said's America
(The University of North Carolina Press)
From the jury:
I Cannot Write My Life is a moving account of the enslavement of Omar Ibn Said, a West African Muslim scholar sold into slavery and brought to North Carolina in the 1800s. It is based on Omar's autobiography, the only one of its kind written in Arabic language in America. In that sense, the book will make a significant contribution to the history of enslavement. At a deeper level, it is about the vulnerability of texts to the cruelty of their context and their susceptibility to being rendered illegible. Lo and Ernst's meticulous research describes the events that placed Said in the headlines with a crafted legendary life story. In this narrative, Omar had been saved from the tyranny of his religion [Islam] by slavery. This was while he tried to tell the story of his enslavement in Arabic knowing full well that it would not be heard. Lo and Ernst refer to Omar's writings, particularly his autobiography as "impossible documents." From their perspective, the impossibility of these documents is due to mistranslation, distortion, and their unavailability to the public for almost two centuries. That is if decades of enslavement had not rendered self-expression impossible for Omar. There is more to language than always being a source of wonder and comprehension, or a tool for liberation.
Award Finalists
In addition to the award winners, the award juries would like to share their 2024 shortlisted finalists in recognition of their exceptional scholarship:
Religion and the Arts Book Award
- Jeremy S. Begbie, Abundantly More: The Theological Promise of the Arts in a Reductionist World (Baker Academic)
- Erika Doss, Spiritual Moderns: Twentieth-Century American Artists and Religion (The University of Chicago Press)
- Cesar D. Favila, Immaculate Sounds: The Musical Lives of Nuns in New Spain (Oxford University Press)
- Mark William Roche, Beautiful Ugliness: Christianity, Modernity, and the Arts (University of Notre Dame Press)
Best First Book in the History of Religions
- (Honorable Mention) Dana Lloyd, Land Is Kin: Sovereignty, Religious Freedom, and Indigenous Sacred Sites (University Press of Kansas)
- Jonathan Brack, An After Life for the Khan: Muslims, Buddhists, and Sacred Kinship in Mongol Iran and Eurasia (University of California Press)
- Divya Cherian, Merchants of Virtue: Hindus, Muslims, and Untouchables in Eighteenth-Century South Asia (University of California Press)
- Matthieu Felt, Meanings of Antiquity: Myth Interpretation in Premodern Japan (Harvard University Press)
- Mark Letteney, The Christianization of Knowledge in Late Antiquity: Intellectual and Material Transformations (Cambridge University Press)
- Douglas Ober, Dust on the Throne: The Search for Buddhism in Modern India (Stanford University Press)
- Laura Yares, Jewish Sunday Schools: Teaching Religion in Nineteenth Century America (NYU Press)
Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion: Analytical-Descriptive Studies
- Yoshiko Ashiwa and David L. Wank, The Space of Religion: Temple, State, and Buddhist Communities in Modern China (Columbia University Press)
- Timothy O. Benedict, Spiritual Ends: Religion and the Heart of Dying in Japan (University of California Press)
- Michael D. Driessen, The Global Politics of Interreligious Dialogue (Oxford University Press)
- Neil Van Leeuwen, Religion as Make-Believe: A Theory of Belief, Imagination, and Group Identity (Harvard University Press)
Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion: Constructive-Reflective Studies
- Seema Golestaneh, Unknowing and the Everyday: Sufism and Knowledge in Iran (Duke University Press)
- Shenila Khoja-Moolji, Rebuilding Community: Displaced Women and the Making of a Shia Ismaili Muslim Sociality (Oxford University Press)
- Andrew Prevot, The Mysticism of Ordinary Life: Theology, Philosophy, and Feminism (Oxford University Press)
- Bryce E. Rich, Gender Essentialism and Orthodoxy: Beyond Male and Female (Fordham University Press)
- Daniel Soars, The World and God Are Not-Two: A Hindu–Christian Conversation (Fordham University Press)
Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion: Historical Studies
- David Friedenreich, Jewish Muslims: How Christian Imagined Islam as the Enemy (University of California Press)
- Andrew S. Jacobs, Gospel Thriller: Conspiracy, Fiction & the Vulnerable Bible (Cambridge University Press)
- Philip Jenkins, A Storm of Images: Iconoclasm and Religious Reform in the Byzantine World (Baylor University Press)
- Elizabeth O'Brien, Surgery and Salvation: The Roots of Reproductive Justice in Mexico (University of North Carolina Press)
- Travis Zadeh, Wonders and Rarities: The Marvelous Book that Traveled the World and Mapped the Cosmos (Harvard University Press)
Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion: Textual Studies
- Jacob Dalton, Conjuring the Buddha: Ritual Manuals in Early Tantric Buddhism (Columbia University Press)
- Matthieu Felt, Meanings of Antiquity: Myth Interpretation in Premodern Japan (Harvard University Asia Center)
- Andrew S. Jacobs, Gospel Thrillers: Conspiracy, Fiction, and the Vulnerable Bible (Cambridge University Press)
- SherAli Tareen, Perilous Intimacies: Debating Hindu-Muslim Friendship After Empire (Columbia University Press)