Please join us in celebrating our members on their professional news and accomplishments!
As a reminder, AAR publishes member accomplishments including new publications, award announcements, and media mentions. Share your wins with us!
Awards and Accomplishments
Candace Lukasik Wins 2025 Alixa Naff Prize in Migration Studies in the “Best Book” Category for Martyrs and Migrants: Coptic Christians and the Persecution Politics of US Empire
The Khayrallah Center for Lebanese Diaspora Studies announced the winners of the 2025 Alixa Naff Prize in Migration Studies in March 2026, honoring outstanding research on Middle East/North African migration. Dr. Candace Lukasik won best book for Martyrs and Migrants: Coptic Christians and the Persecution Politics of US Empire.
Books and Publications
Lauree Brown
Beyond the Well: A Novel Inspired by the Women at the Well
Beyond the Well is a historical fiction novel that reimagines the life of the Samaritan woman, known as Photine, before and after her encounter at Jacob’s well. Living in a society shaped by rigid traditions and judgment, Photine navigates loss and love, multiple marriages, and deep personal shame while quietly holding on to her dignity and inner strength. Through hardship and experience, her journey becomes one of survival, faith, and self-discovery.
P. C. Saidalavi
Seeking Allah’s Hierarchy: Caste, Labor, and Islam in India
“Arguing for a radical return to desire in Luce Irigaray’s thought, this book decisively intervenes in impasses around questions of identity that continue to confound contemporary discourse and politics. By prioritizing the disruptive potential of desire rather than sexual difference, Wesley N. Barker extends Irigaray’s relational theory of becoming into new territory, opening generative, often surprising pathways for conversation with philosophies of race, queer theory, political theology, decolonial theory, and posthuman thought. As a source for reimagining materiality, desire is pulled free of a phallocentric, white, colonial framework and mobilized toward a philosophy of living capable of addressing the twenty-first century’s multifaceted crises of identity, representation, and embodiment.”