2025 AAR Book Award Winners

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The American Academy of Religion is pleased to announce the 2025 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!

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

9781978828179

Rachel Feldman

Messianic Zionism in the Digital Age: Jews, Noahides, and the Third Temple Imaginary (Rutgers University Press)

From the jury:
"This gripping multi-sited ethnography shows the promise of religious studies while pushing our field in new directions. Feldman follows her subjects around the world, from Israel to the Philippines to the Internet, showing how ideologies evolve as they circulate and how movements change unexpectedly. Deftly navigating complex and fraught politics, Feldman sensitively explores the lived experiences of a variety of actors while never losing sight of the high stakes and political context. She does not toggle between broad analysis and intimate portraits but, instead, writes at multiple scales at the same time. Her subjects develop flexible and dynamic religious identities, traversing ideologies and networks, shaped by a world they are seeking to reshape. This book captures something about the way we live now: online and in person, amid geopolitical violence, in a world of innovation and cruelty. A book for our times, this work reminds us why religious studies matters and shows us, in fresh ways, what scholarship can do."

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

9780197771303

Rafal K. Stepien

Buddhism between Philosophy and Religion: Nāgārjuna and the Ethics of Emptiness (Oxford University Press)

From the jury:
"Buddhism between Philosophy and Religion carries out a provocative analysis of the Indian thinker Nāgārjuna’s commitment to “no-views,” which the author connects to compassion and the ethics of emptiness. Stepien’s book offers a fascinating example of the philosophy of religion from a Buddhist foundation with a timely critique of modern Eurocentric biases that mar the study of religious ideas. Most significantly, the author proposes, enacts and models a way forward and out, and does so in a way that defies the normative-descriptive distinction in the study of religion."

Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion: Historical Studies

9780674294172

Samantha Kelly

Translating Faith: Ethiopian Pilgrims in Renaissance Rome (Harvard University Press)

From the jury:
"In Translating Faith: Ethiopian Pilgrims in Renaissance Rome, Samantha Kelly has fundamentally reshaped our understanding of religious intercultural exchange. This systematic archival investigation of the Santo Stefano community offers a deeply historical analysis of the intersections between African and Latin Christians sharing and contending for religious space in sixteenth-century Rome. Kelly’s innovative study rethinks conventional models of cultural diffusion to reveal how Ethiopian Orthodox pilgrims navigated Catholic conformity. This challenges traditional assumptions about religious orthodoxy while revealing the theological collaborations that emerged between Christian communities at the time. By attending to the racialized dimensions of these interactions with sensitivity and nuance, this project exposes the limitations of Eurocentric approaches to Christian history. Kelly offers a persuasive methodological framework for future scholars grappling with questions of religious diversity, cultural interaction, and archival interpretation. The jury enthusiastically agrees that the text will be an essential reading that not only models how to recover forgotten voices but restructures our understanding of religious encounters and exchanges in the premodern world."

Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion: Textual Studies

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Signe Cohen

I, Yantra: Exploring Self and Selflessness in Ancient Indian Robot Tales (SUNY Press)

From the jury:
"[The book] reveals fascinating and little-known anecdotes regarding androids in ancient and medieval literature, bringing to light otherwise untapped sources. It reveals overlaps between ancient past and fantasies of the future, technology and religion, and connects seemingly unconnected geographies. The author contextualizes the tales of the Yantras by placing them in the literary history of the creation of mechanical beings in India as well as the west. She establishes the multidimensional character of the Yantras as sacred diagrams as well as robots. In the process, she also examines the potential give-and-take between Yantras and their automata counterparts in ancient Greek literature. Her analysis of the Indian tales that present the cosmos itself as a mechanical device is enlightening as well. Against this background, the author uses divine tropes in Hindu tales to demonstrate that the human body can indeed be compared to a machine."

Religion and the Arts Book Award

9780691257990

Anna Lise Seastrand

Body, History, Myth: Early Modern Murals in South India (Princeton University Press)

From the jury:

"Meticulously researched, well-structured, convincingly argued, and beautifully produced, this book offers insights about the profound interplay between "visual stories," somatic engagement, and practices of devotion in particular streams of Hinduism. With prose that is clear, economical, and precise, Seastrand moves the reader through multiple sites, spaces, and places. The careful attention given to the form and function of murals encourages the reader to think afresh about religion and embodiment. The approach taken in Body, History, Myth is nimbly multi-disciplinary, intertwining historical and literary studies methods in its consideration of material religion. Its sixth chapter, on talapuranams (legends about sacred sites), provides an elegant example. In short, this book is a serious, solid, significant academic achievement—truly a fine resource."

Best First Book in the History of Religions

9780231560368

Rajbir Singh Judge

Prophetic Maharaja: Loss, Sovereignty, and the Sikh Tradition in Colonial South Asia (Columbia University Press)

From the jury:

"This highly sophisticated book takes a deep dive into the role that Duleep Singh played in nineteenth-century Sikhism, and what recovering his role means for the Sikh tradition.

With an attentive eye to relevant concerns in the discourse of the critical study of religion, Rajbir Singh Judge guides the reader into an appreciative yet multifaceted reading of Singh within the complexities of colonialism amid a simultaneous emerging industrial capitalism in the West. It locates the humanity of Sikhism in the context of its own reformist impulses. A great accomplishment in the history of the study of Sikh religion, and a book that illuminates not only a significant epoch in Colonial South Asia, but also the global experience of loss and sovereignty, as well as the possibility of transmission of an uprooted and dislocated tradition."

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

  • Ben Van Overmeire, American Koan: Imagining Zen and Self in Autobiographical Literature (University of Virginia Press)
  • Daniel K. L. Chua, Music and Joy: Music and Joy (Yale University Press)
  • Jean Derricotte-Murphy, A View from the Balcony—Opera through Womanist Eyes: Praxis for Developing a Balcony Hermeneutic of Restorative Resistance (Cascade Books: Wipf and Stock Publishers)
  • Jessica Roda, For Women and Girls Only: Reshaping Jewish Orthodoxy through the Arts in the Digital Age
    (NYU Press)
  • Nathan McGovern, Holy Things: The Genealogy of the Sacred in Thai Religion (Oxford University Press)

Best First Book in the History of Religions

  • Aziza Shanazarova, Female Religiosity in Central Asia: Sufi Leaders in the Persianate World (Cambridge University Press)

  • Cuilan Liu, Buddhism in Court: Religion, Law, and Jurisdiction in China (Oxford University Press)

  • Leslie Beth Ribovich, Without a Prayer: Religion and Race in New York City Public Schools (NYU Press)

  • Mo Pareles, Nothing Pure: Jewish Law, Christian Supersession, and Bible Translation in Old English (University of Toronto Press)

  • Tehseen Thaver, Beyond Sectarianism: Ambiguity, Hermeneutics, and the Formations of Religious Identity in Islam(University of Pennsylvania Press)

  • Toni Alimi, Slaves of God: Augustine and Other Romans on Religion and Politics (Princeton University Press)

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

  • (Honorable mention) Tehseen Thaver, Beyond Sectarianism: Ambiguity, Hermeneutics, and the Formations of Religious Identity in Islam (University of Pennsylvania Press)

  • (Honorable mention) Leerom Medovoi, The Inner Life of Race: Souls, Bodies, and the History of Racial Power (Duke University Press)

  • Rajbir Singh Judge, Prophetic Maharaja: Loss, Sovereignty, and the Sikh Tradition in Colonial South Asia (Columbia University Press)

  • Nathanael J. Homewood, Seductive Spirits: Deliverance, Demons, and Sexual Worldmaking in Ghanaian Pentecostalism(Stanford University Press)

  • Mona Oraby, Devotion to the Administrative State: Religion and Social Order in Egypt (Princeton University Press)

  • Hugh B. Urban, The Path of Desire: Living Tantra in Northeast India (The University of Chicago Press)

  • Sally M. Promey, Religion in Plain View: Public Aesthetics of American Display (University of Chicago Press)

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

  • An Yountae, The Coloniality of the Secular: Race, Religion, and Poetics of World-Making (Duke University Press)

  • Anthony B. Pinn, Deathlife: Hip Hop and Thanatological Narrations of Blackness (Duke University Press)

  • David W. Congdon, Who Is a True Christian?: Contesting Religious Identity in American Culture (Cambridge University Press)

  • O'neil Van Horn, On the Ground: Terrestrial Theopoetics and Planetary Politics (Fordham University Press)

  • Tehseen Thaver, Beyond Sectarianism: Ambiguity, Hermeneutics, and the Formations of Religious Identity in Islam(University of Pennsylvania Press)

  • Travis Pickell, Burdened Agency: Christian Theology and End-of-Life Ethics (University of Notre Dame Press)

Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion: Historical Studies

  • Cuilan Liu, Buddhism in Court: Religion, Law, and Jurisdiction in China (Oxford University Press)

  • Ivan G. Marcus, How the West Became Antisemitic: Jews and the Formation of Europe, 800–1500 (Princeton University Press)

  • Jerome E. Copulsky, American Heretics: Religious Adversaries of Liberal Order (Yale University Press)

  • Malika Zeghal, The Making of the Modern Muslim State: Islam and Governance in the Middle East and North Africa(Princeton University Press)

Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion: Textual Studies

  • Yii-Jan Lin, Immigration and Apocalypse: How the Book of Revelation Shaped American Immigration (Yale University Press)

  • Duc Dau, Sex, Celibacy, and Deviance: The Victorians and the Song of Songs (The Ohio State University Press)

  • Mahjabeen Dhala, Feminist Theology and Social Justice in Islam: A Study on the Sermon of Fatima (Cambridge University Press)

  • Jason A Staples, Paul and the Resurrection of Israel: Jews, Former Gentiles, Israelites (Cambridge University Press)

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