2026 AAR Book Award Winners
About
The American Academy of Religion is pleased to announce the 2026 recipients of the Best First Book in Religious Studies; the Religion and the Arts Book Award; the Best Work in Textual or Historical Studies; the Best Work in the Study of Practices, Communities, or Lived Contexts; the Best Work in Theoretical, Philosophical, or Critical Studies; and the Best Work in Applied, Public, or Pedagogical Approaches.
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!
Best First Book in Religious Studies
Mariam Goshadze
The Noise Silence Makes: Secularity and Ghana’s Drum Wars (Duke University Press)
From the jury:
“Goshadze uses historical and ethnographic data on the Drum Wars, or noise bans in Accra, to trace the sociopolitical tension between Ga religion and Pentecostal/Charismatic churches in contemporary urban Ghana and offer an expanded concept of secularity rooted in the Ghanian state’s engagement with traditional ‘lifeworlds.’ Goshadze’s study of the sonic landscape of contemporary Ghana, specifically how sound and legal definitions of noise have the potential to disrupt and reify colonial religious and cultural hierarchies, challenges assumptions about the relationship between ‘traditional’ or ‘indigenous’ religions, secularity, and power. The committee agrees that the book compels questions that stretch across fields, and we are excited about the conversations it will yield in the years ahead.”
Religion and the Arts Book Award
Anthony M. Petro
Provoking Religion: Sex, Art, and the Culture Wars (Oxford University Press)
From the jury:
Anthony Petro’s Provoking Religion is a master class in close readings of style, history, and an imaginative use of religion as an analytic category. Well-written and interdisciplinary in scope, Petro's re-framing of the 1980s and 90s Culture Wars through attention to some of the feminist and queer artists at the center of disputes during the period is both timely and incisive. In addition to complicating some of the binaries that have defined Culture Wars narratives and that continue to inform public discourses today, his robust attention to the religious dimensions of works by artists such as Judy Chicago and Renee Cox unearths a ‘feminist and queer arts of religion.’ Here, Petro's attention to how these artists—framed by most Culture Wars narratives as ‘anti-Christian secularists’—articulated alternative religious and spiritual visions and sensibilities through their work provides further nuance to the nexus between religion, art, and politics. Provoking Religion is a consequential book for many fields.”
Best Work in Textual or Historical Studies
Rian Thum
Islamic China: An Asian History (Harvard University Press)
From the jury:
“In Islamic China: An Asian History, Rian Thum offers a novel pathway to understanding how Islam took root and developed within Chinese history. Building on the study of an original archive, Thum traces the routes of trade, migration, and pilgrimage through which Muslim practices and communities became interwoven with Chinese life and culture. This global treatment of Islam ensures that the tradition is situated within Chinese religious history, rather than adjacent to it—that its presence is ordinary, rather than extraordinary. Beyond Thum’s noteworthy approach to this record, the book’s distinction lies in its method. The author skillfully investigates how faith traveled and settled into rhythms of daily life, offering fresh space to consider questions of religious diffusion, transmission, syncretism and belonging. The structure of the book is a masterclass in argumentation, while offering a rich narrative of interconnected stories across centuries and identities. The committee agreed that its topic and model are well-suited for teaching, and that Thum’s study reframes understandings of Islamic history in China, while leaving readers with lasting questions about religious belonging and exchange.”
Best Work in the Study of Practices, Communities, or Lived Contexts
Candace Lukasik
Martyrs and Migrants: Coptic Christians and the Persecution Politics of US Empire (New York University Press)
From the jury:
“In this sensitive and compelling account of martyrdom, persecution, racialization, sacrifice, empire, and the ‘economy of blood,’ Candace Lukasik attends to the bodily hermeneutics of Egyptian Coptic Christians as they navigate the United States asylum process. She shows how Copts distinguish their Christian bodies and selves from Muslim others, making this difference legible to agents of the state as well as U.S. evangelicals. Navigating the tensions of religious belonging and racialization, some Copts embrace politics (e.g., Trumpism) and civic formations (e.g., policing) aligned with the same state security apparatus that surveils the transnational racialized Arab body. A complex work on the ‘theopolitics of empire,’ Martyrs and Migrants, through its subtle and striking portraits of understudied subjects, illuminates novel instantiations of imperialism. Among its many contributions to religious studies is to encourage critical reflection on the possibilities and limits of solidarity in our contemporary moment.”
Best Work in Theoretical, Philosophical, or Critical Studies
Jessica X. Zu
Just Awakening: Yogācāra Social Philosophy in Modern China (Columbia University Press)
From the jury:
“Just Awakening not only offers a social theory of transformation based on Yogācāra soteriology but also transforms the research paradigm and ‘changes the referents’ in the field. Jessica X. Zu immerses the reader in the intellectual history of a pivotal moment for China while deftly navigating the intersections of global intellectual currents. Through rich theoretical interventions, Zu consistently points to Yogācāra's contemporary relevance for social philosophy. At once a model for descriptive and normative scholarship, the book particularly stands out for its palpable humanist impulse that recognizes the urgent need for an alternative vision for society and global community to shape a better world. Just Awakening is a model for a forward-looking, normatively engaged, postcolonial Buddhist studies.”
Best Work in Applied, Public, or Pedagogical Approaches
Youcef Soufi
Homegrown Radicals: A Story of State Violence, Islamophobia, and Jihad in the Post-9/11 World (New York University Press)
From the jury:
“In Homegrown Radicals, Youcef Soufi delivers an ‘exemplar of public-facing scholarship’ that examines how anti-radicalization policies and state surveillance affect Muslim communities. By combining historical analysis, socio-political context, and his own lived experience, Soufi offers a poignant look at how one Canadian community navigated grief following the disappearance of several local young men. His use of a ‘powerfully moving’ auto-ethnographic perspective allows him to ground complex academic concepts in personal reality without sacrificing scholarly rigor. Ultimately, the book ‘invites a wide array of readers into a wider conversation’ by urging us to reconsider the human cost of the war on terror and the limits of modern radicalization discourse.”
Award Finalists
In addition to the award winners, the award juries would like to share their 2026 shortlisted finalists in recognition of their exceptional scholarship:
Best First Book in Religious Studies
- *Honorable Mention* Alaina M. Morgan, Atlantic Crescent: Building Geographies of Black and Muslim Liberation in the African Diaspora (University of North Carolina Press)
- Michael Amoruso, Moved by the Dead: Haunting and Devotion in São Paulo, Brazil (University of North Carolina Press)
- Catherine Hartmann, Making the Invisible Real: Practices of Seeing in Tibetan Pilgrimage (Oxford University Press)
- Basit Kareem Iqbal, The Dread Heights: Tribulation and Refuge after the Syrian Revolution (Fordham University Press)
Religion and the Arts Book Award
- Jamie L. Brummitt, Protestant Relics in Early America (Oxford University Press)
- Mark S. Cladis, Radical Romanticism: Democracy, Religion, and the Environmental Imagination (Columbia University Press)
- Melanie R. Hill, Colored Women Sittin’ on High: Womanist Sermonic Practice in Literature and Music (University of North Carolina Press)
- Inderjit N. Kaur, Sensational Rhythms of the Ineffable: Ethical Affects in Sikh Sabad Kīrtan (Oxford University Press)
- Heather Walton, Practical Theology Beyond the Empirical Turn (SCM Press)
Best Work in Textual or Historical Studies
- *Honorable Mention* Sonia Hazard, Empire of Print: Evangelical Power in an Age of Mass Media (Oxford University Press)
- Tatiana Bur, Technologies of the Marvellous in Ancient Greek Religion (Cambridge University Press)
- Raimundo C. Barreto, Base Ecumenism: Latin American Contributions to Ecumenical Praxis and Theology (Fortress Press)
- Ahmad Greene-Hayes, Underworld Work: Black Atlantic Religion Making in Jim Crow New Orleans (University of Chicago Press)
- Pamela Lothspeich, The Radheshyam Ramayan in Text and Performance (Oxford University Press)
- Adam J. Silverstein, Haman: A Biography (Princeton University Press)
- Thomas A. Tweed, Religion in the Lands That Became America (Yale University Press)
Best Work in the Study of Practices, Communities, or Lived Contexts
- *Honorable Mention* Yasmin Moll, The Revolution Within: Islamic Media and the Struggle for a New Egypt (Stanford University Press)
- Youssef Belal, The Life of Shari'a: A Comparative Anthropology of Law (University of California Press)
- Ting Guo, Religion, Secularism, and Love as a Political Discourse in Modern China (Amsterdam University Press / Routledge)
- Lauren Hutchinson Derby, Bêtes Noires: Sorcery as History in the Haitian-Dominican Borderlands (Duke University Press)
- Basit Kareem Iqbal, The Dread Heights: Tribulation and Refuge after the Syrian Revolution (Fordham University Press)
- Maya Mayblin, Vote of Faith: Democracy, Desire, and the Turbulent Lives of Priest Politicians (Fordham University Press)
- Kirsten Wesselhoeft, Fraternal Critique: The Politics of Muslim Community in France (The University of Chicago Press)
Best Work in Theoretical, Philosophical, or Critical Studies
- Amey Victoria Adkins-Jones, Immaculate Misconceptions: A Black Mariology (Oxford University Press)
- Hannah Lucas, Impossible Recovery: Julian of Norwich and the Phenomenology of Well-Being (Columbia University Press)
- Robert MacSwain, Saints as Divine Evidence: The Hagiological Argument for the Existence of God (Cambridge University Press)
- Peter C. Phan, Christianity and Migration: A Christian Theology of Migration for Our Age (Oxford University Press)
- Christopher D. Tirres, Liberating Spiritualities: Reimagining Faith in the Américas (Fordham University Press)
Best Work in Applied, Public, or Pedagogical Approaches
- *Honorable Mention* Edward Wright-Ríos, Devotion in Motion: Pilgrimage in Modern Mexico (University of Chicago Press)
- Sarah Hammerschlag (editor), Critical Terms for Religious Studies, Second Edition (University of Chicago Press)
- Lauren E. Osborne, Hearing Islam: The Sounds of a Global Religious Tradition (Routledge)